When twenty-five-year-old Stead returns to Sydney on shore leave in 1943, he has one thing in mind: to look up Marina, a brilliant pianist whose company he had enjoyed for a mere three days before the outbreak of war. But Marina is missing. Soon after she set off for London to take up a music scholarship she disappeared, with nary a scrap of information left behind to console her widowed mother. So captivated is Stead by his idealised memories of their brief courtship that, despite a five-year absence, he decides to find his beloved with the chestnut hair and the magical fingers. Nostalgia assures that ‘In his mind she was encapsulated in that golden time, sealed like a fly in amber’. However, fate throws substantial obstacles in Stead’s way, including the full arsenal of World War II. After many setbacks, and to the surprise of no one, fortune eventually favours the desperate and the brave.

The arc of The Voyagers’ narrative is hardly original: boy meets girl, they fall in love, become separated, and then, much later, reconnect. Cue the stirring sounds of mournful violins (or rather, in this case, tinkling piano keys). It is giving nothing away to say that, notwithstanding the near misses, inopportune choices, and man-made disasters that separate the lovers, the choppy seas that symbolise their estrangement do finally settle into calmer waters. The Voyagers is a literary romance that crosses over into popular fiction, and McConnochie provides plenty of perilous adventures to test the resolve of Stead and Marina. As though it wasn’t difficult enough trying to find someone among the scrum and flux of soldiers, civilians, and refugees, the pair also have to contend with aerial and sea attacks, torpedoes and shipwrecks.

Like her previous works, which are all tightly plotted literary romances, The Voyagers is a page-turning read. McConnochie’s skill is to make the reader care enough to want to follow her protagonists as they cross oceans in search of each another, even if one has to suspend disbelief at some of the unlikely near-death encounters they experience while doing so. Her star-crossed characters are sympathetically drawn, her writing unfussy and accessible. Stead, the American sailor, is not a career navy man but an ordinary sailor involved in import–export deals to numerous destinations. As stable as his name suggests, his easygoing temperament means that he is content to be pulled along in the slipstream, the straight man to the more flamboyant antics of best friend Slick. Marina, too, is modest and winsome; only her prowess at the piano separates her from her peers. Their appeal lies in their unassuming natures and their misfortune in being caught up in extraordinary circumstances.

For about two-thirds of the book, the pacing is leisurely, giving ample opportunity to be apprised of the back-story of Stead and Marina. Their dalliance occurs at a time when ‘nice’ unmarried girls certainly did not get in the family way. After some time exploring the ramifications of the sexual politics of the era, McConnochie casts her sights beyond suburban Australia as the world hurtles towards self-destruction. The momentum picks up and the action becomes frantic as the last years, months, and days of the war are played out. Colour and movement crowd the pages, so much so that The Voyagers would be easily translatable into Hollywood-style celluloid. Not only are the lead characters young and attractive, but within the melodramatic plot there are multiple location changes, from pre-war Sydney and London during the Blitz, to the Far East in Singapore and Shanghai. The narrative, written in the second person, alternates between the perspectives of Stead and Marina. Eschewing chronological order, it moves back and forth in time and place, a device that would have been confusing except for the fact that the author helpfully prefixes each chapter with a destination and date (e.g., Shanghai 1939).

It is interesting to follow the musical trajectory of Marina, the starry-eyed ingénue who finds herself not in a London music school but, in a bizarre twist of fate, playing piano at a smoky nightclub in the dangerously glamorous city of Shanghai, and then in a prison camp in Changi. She moves from an appreciation of music on a theoretical and technical level to realising the importance of performing popular melodies for an audience that just wants to be transported beyond its daily horrors. Stead, too, is forced to shed his happy-go-lucky demeanour after encountering one too many corpses: ‘To see the aftermath, when the dying has been done, is not so bad. The horror of a body once life is gone is not so great as the horror of someone who is about to become a body. Death is quiet.’

The Voyagers is an escapist adventure written by an author who satisfies and exploits the criteria of a romance. The novel may have a foregone conclusion, but the journey there is an eventful and compelling one.