While Frank is helping to lay a pipeline across the desert, his father goes to Gallipoli and is shot down in one of the bloody and futile charges at The Nek. Frank and Daisy take part in various attacks that steadily push back the Turks, culminating in the famous mounted attack on Beersheba, across three kilometres of open ground and against an entrenched enemy supported by artillery and machine guns. When the battle is over, under cover of night, Frank returns to the trenches, locates his rifle and bayonet amid the hundreds of bodies, and gives a decent burial to the two Turks he believes he personally killed. A huge suspension of disbelief is required here, but the point is made: the Turks were loyal creatures too, and respect is due.

Definitely not a loyal creature is Joan, the girl Frank left behind in Cudgegong, who writes him a ‘Dear John’ letter. To be fair to Joan, the romance had taken place largely in Frank’s head, and she hadn’t answered any of his letters in the past three years – but still, the disloyalty of women! Frank, in the desert, burns the letter: ‘After a long time, I realised Daisy was looking at me. Sympathy on her face. Some wouldn’t have reckoned that was possible, but I saw it.’ In such a way and throughout the novel, Gleitzman avoids outright anthropomorphism while still portraying Daisy as subject to a range of human emotions. This, of course, only makes the final ride out into the desert, where Daisy ‘chooses her spot’, all the harder to read.

Another war, another horse. Suzy Zail’s Alexander Altmann A10567 (Black Dog Books, $18.95 pb, 288 pp) explores a similar theme: how important a relationship with an animal can be for a person in a tough – even hellish – situation, such as war or inside a concentration camp. For most inmates of Auschwitz, such a relationship was well nigh impossible for obvious reasons, but for fourteen-year-old Alexander it is his salvation. Like Hanna in Zail’s first novel, The Wrong Boy (2012), also set in Auschwitz, Alexander has a talent which will keep him alive: not playing the piano, but handling horses – more specifically, Midnight, the wild black stallion he is ordered to break in for the commandant. The boy’s way of coping with the horrors around him, including the loss of his mother and the murder of his little sister, has been to harden his heart, repress all memories of home and family, and make no friends. But slowly a bond of trust develops between boy and horse. It is tested on the death-march evacuation of Auschwitz as the Russians advance. The novel is a harrowing read, as it must be, and there are few if any light moments. As if in compensation, the ending seems rushed, too good to be true, but, according to Zail, the novel was inspired by the real-life story of a Jewish guide at Melbourne’s Holocaust Centre.

I wasn’t sure I could take more institutional cruelty and horror, but I was lulled into a sense of false optimism by the bright and whimsical cover art of Zana Fraillon’s No Stars to Wish On (Allen & Unwin, $15.99 pb, 176 pp), which gave little indication of the grim subject matter. ‘Forgotten Australians’ is the name now given to the children who were thought to be at risk and were forcibly removed from carers and family, particularly between 1920 and 1970, and placed in soulless institutions where they were frequently abused, physically, mentally, sexually. Six-year-old Jack is one such child, torn from a large extended family, along with two younger siblings, all of them placed in a convent circled with barbed wire and staffed by sadistic nuns. Jack is given the number 49, which leads him to wonder about the fate of the former boy 49. By the time he has discovered what this is, I felt I was back in Auschwitz. All the cruelties Fraillon includes in the novel – the starvation rations, the slave labour in the laundries, the beltings and confinements – are documented and actually happened, but they sit rather uneasily beside the magic realism of the subplot, which provides Jack with the happy ending not bestowed on many other Forgotten Australians.

A safe ending at least for Cara, the eleven-year-old girl living with her family behind the Wall in Catherine Norton’s The Crossing (Omnibus, $16.99 pb, 181 pp). Although not stated, the setting is obviously East Berlin; Cara’s parents work for National Security and are apt to disappear for long periods, leaving Cara and her younger sister Lilith to fend for themselves. During one such absence, Cara finds herself increasingly drawn to the family who inhabit the top floor of her building. In the grey concrete drabness of daily life, they provide colour and warmth and home-cooked meals, and she strikes up a friendship with the son, Leon, and his older sister, Ava. One day she overhears a careless remark and reports it to her father, which has dire consequences for the family upstairs. Then Ava disappears.

This is a short book and from here things move quickly to the ‘crossing’. Perhaps that is why I found it problematic, not just the intricate execution of the escape itself by two children, but also Cara’s split-second decision to leave everything behind, including her family. That she does so is in part motivated by the guilt she feels over her betrayal and her desire to atone for it, but I found her capitulation unconvincing. The story was inspired by a brave and daring escape across the Wall in 1983, not by a couple of children, but by two young men.

Surely Figgy in the World (Omnibus, $15.99 pb, 183 pp), with its brightly coloured cover, was the antidote to all these books about war and death and suffering? The author note tells me that Tamsin Janu wrote her story after working for three months at an orphanage in Ghana. Figgy is an endearing character and so is her pet goat, Kwame. When they set off to walk to America to get medicine for Figgy’s sick grandmother, I am with them all the way, even though I know that goat is going to present narrative problems down the track. And so it proves. Poor Kwame is removed from the story, brutally and abruptly, and it is quite devastating.