The Occupation

by Chloe Adams

In the autumn of 1949, two women convene in the parlour of a Melbourne hotel. Tess is married and childless. Mary, unwed and pregnant. Surrendering to the unimaginable, Mary agrees to a life-altering she will give her child to Tess.
One year earlier, Mary stands on the deck of an Australian naval ship, awaiting arrival in the ruined Japanese city of Kure. There, thousands of Australians have established an occupation of the Hiroshima prefecture.
As she settles into her new life, Mary finds carefree expats touring the countryside, hosting picnics and even throwing parties, all while the war-ravaged locals try to rebuild their lives.
When she meets Sully, an Australian journalist, Mary's idealised notion of the occupation crumbles. Confronted by moral ambiguity on such a grand scale, she becomes reckless.
Returning home may seem the answer, but even there, echoes of the occupation linger.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Historical, Japan

Audible Audio

Published July 15, 2025

About the author

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Reviews

[Karren Sandercock · Rating 4 out of 5]

1948. Mary Egan is from Melbourne and she travels by ship to the Japanese city of Kure as part of the provisional emancipation force. At the camp Mary shares a room with Noreen and Ida, and works in YWCA or the Dew Drop Inn, serving food and in their time off they explore the countryside, go on picnics and attend dances.

Mary finds it hard to comprehend that only three years ago the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on the nearby city of Hiroshima, and she’s believes they did the right thing, it ended the war and saved the lives of our soldiers and including one of her brothers.

Mary meets Sullivan Darling or Sully a reporter and journalist, and he explains it killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians, in a horrendous and cruel way and they have no idea of lasting consequences?

I received a copy of The Occupation by Chloe Adams from NetGalley and Penguin Random House Australia in exchange for an unbiased review.

The narrative highlights many things, including Australia’s attitude towards to Japanese at the time and it wasn’t good due to what happened to our POW’s. I had no idea women were send to the country to help the emancipation force, they could drive to Hiroshima and look at where the bomb was dropped, and no safety precautions were taken and buy a souvenir (the ladies had to be escorted by men), and the attitudes towards and how unplanned pregnancies were dealt with.

I’ve never read a post-World War Two book like this before, Chloe Adams debut novel sheds light on both sides of the Pacific conflict and the aftermath in an enlightening and understanding way, and I highly recommend for fans of At the Food of the Cherry Tree by Alli Parker.

Four and a half stars from me and I can't wait to see what Ms Adams writes next.

[Craig and Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Big thanks to Penguin for sending us a copy to read and review.
Local debut author Chloe Adams gives readers a historical tale about a little known period in history that makes for a reasonable story.
In the opening scenes we hear of a pregnant Mary agreeing to a pact of giving her unborn child to Tess….. why?
Backtracking to a year before in 1948, where Mary Egan is travelling on a ship to Japan.
There she sees how it has affected all after the bombing of Hiroshima.
She settles into her new life, going to parties while the locals repair their lives and meets Australian journalist Sully.
This changes her life forever……
Lifted from her own family history, Chloe has written a slow burn plot that’s vivid in detail.
While it’s written well, it’s lacking something I can’t quite put my finger on.
I’m rounding it up to four stars as the historical content is newish for a book and the main characters are quite interesting.

[Lucia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written book - it’s difficult terrain to navigate but I think Chloe Adams does well bringing us into Mary’s 1940s world and perspective on the complexities and tensions of the time.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Winner of the 2024 Penguin Literary Prize, Chloe Adam's first novel The Occupation is historical fiction set in the aftermath of WW2 during the Occupation of Japan.  My response to reading it is a bit conflicted.

Firstly, I think it's a very good thing that Australian novelists are looking to our own history for inspiration, and that they are at last recognising that this history includes people and events from our own geographical region.  Chloe Adams has chosen to interrogate Australia's history as part of the US-led occupation force that operated in Japan from 1946 to 1952.  Australian men and women served during the occupation of the Hiroshima Prefecture at Kure, on a military base very near the site of the first atomic bomb attack. Presumably unaware of the dangers of lingering radiation, dependent families with children joined their spouses and set up an expat community. This is a situation ripe for exploration in an historical novel.

And for author Chloe Adams, this setting enabled her to include family history involving an illegitimate baby conceived during that Occupation.  And this is where I wish Penguin's editors had served her better, because this is why the novel goes awry.  A prize-winning MS does not necessarily become a successful book if it has flaws.  The balance between the romance in Japan and its consequences in Australia needed editorial intervention, IMO.

Mary, the central character, is a dental nurse unexpectedly assigned to work instead at the 'Dew Drop Inn, YWCA'.  She is not like the other young women who shake off the restraints of wartime Australia and enjoy the relaxed atmosphere of dancing, dating and Having A Great Time with the 'boys', all without thinking too much about the terrible circumstances that have put this playground at their disposal. Mary is melancholy, aloof, moody and solitary.  She does a lot of silent introspection which includes unkind but unexpressed critical thoughts about the people around her, especially Mrs Richards, Secretary of the Y.  It is Mrs Richards who has asked for someone reliable to replace the volunteers — plenty of them from the dependents group — who come and go on a whim, constantly off touring the country, and I dare say half of them couldn't do a sum to save a life.' 

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/09/24/t...

[Anabela · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great debut that lingers long after the last page.

The Occupation by @chloeadams3000 sweeps us into the uneasy calm of post‑ WWII Hiroshima, seen through the eyes of Mary—young woman stationed in the Australian-occupied city of Kure. Her encounter with the empathetic journalist Sully unravels her sheltered worldview, exposing the moral chasms beneath sunny picnics and expat gatherings.

Drawing from her grandmother’s own experience, Adams delivers a slow-burning narrative rich in historical texture, exploring the expectations placed on women in the 1940s, and the soft, stubborn strength required to reckon with impossible choices.

There is tenderness, regret, and resilience in Mary’s journey, a story of confronting privilege, legacy, and the echoes of a life she can’t escape. It’s a powerful and introspective read—deeply affecting.

Thank you so much @penguinbooksaus for the #gifted copy.

[Siegrist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chloe Adams has said that the heart of her novel The Occupation is a family story, an ‘unexamined shadow’ that she feels liberating to tell. Mary escapes a comfortable but constrained life in suburban Melbourne to work as a nurse in post war Japan. This opens Mary’s world. The platitudes she has absorbed about the Japanese people are no longer comfortable as she forms friendships and witnesses their suffering. She also embarks on a passionate love affair with Sully, a journalist. The cruel attitudes to unplanned pregnancy are also poignantly explored. I found I came to really care for Mary. The small stories in the margins of the mainstream war narratives are so interesting and important.

[bookrantswithj · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was really interested in this book as there aren’t a lot of books written about this period of history and, although the writing was good in the first half, I became more and more surprised this won the Penguin Prize. For a book set in Japan, there are almost no named Japanese characters that exist for more than half a page and, despite the author’s declaration that she chose not to write from a Japanese perspective as a creative choice, she still recounts the Japanese experience at Hiroshima - just as reportage through a white journalist who has interviewed survivors. Even though the main character has dinner with a family of survivors! Although, she somehow barely speaks to any of them and instead just observes.

The author also mentions that she uses derogatory language as it’s time appropriate but she only uses them when necessary, but more often than not, those terms are only ever used casually and rarely ‘necessarily.’

History has been whitewashed enough and it doesn’t seem like it wouldn’t have been that hard to include more Japanese characters with thoughts, opinions, and even NAMES, while not expressly embodying or speaking directly for the Japanese people. Given the author is a journalist, it seems odd she didn’t utilise her research skills to create additional characters that weren’t white or Australian, given 90% of the book is set in an entirely different country.

I really wanted to like it, as the writing style in the first quarter is really vivid and immersive, but the lack of Japanese characters represented as anything more than ancillary staff, plus the odd twist (which seems to be the inspiration for the story and could’ve been a much different book weighted for that) really soured the experience of the read for me. I noticed too, in the note on the historical record, the author says the male love interest is inspired by a real journalist, Sir Allan Clifton. Is the implication that he is her grandfather? The fact that the first texts she references in her notes are about Japanese war brides and Japanese women seems hypocritical, considering they’re barely represented in the book. Why not talk about the Australian sources first and the Japanese sources second, as that’s the weight they’re given in the story?

A real shame.

[Jackie McMillan · Rating 2 out of 5]

“War had come, the scene seemed to say, and then, just as suddenly, it departed.” The Occupation follows the path of Mary Egan, a young Melbourne woman, who escapes the confines of family and gender to be part of the occupation of Japan in the Hiroshima prefecture. I guess Mary could be forgiven for finding this level of freedom intoxicating being the role women were relegated to in 1949, as the latter part of the book makes abundantly clear. However she looks wilfully naive and callous with respect to the Japanese people, the role of occupiers, and even toward Sully, the man she dates while she’s there. I understand Mary is drowned in propaganda: “The opening passage laid out their mission – they must help the Japanese make themselves worthy to stand beside the peoples of the civilised world.” However, I wanted to ask why Chloe Adams was telling this woman’s story?

What does Mary bring to our understanding of ‘The Occupation’? For me it’s that Australian women were callous little twits more interested in getting laid and landing husbands. Mary making up stories about Nancy, a Japanese women who was right in front of her rather than actually establishing a genuine friendship with them was a good example. Mary also judges her friends for how they look as they go on picnics and attend dances, but never turns that lens on herself. I found her an unsatisfying character who didn’t really cast a lens on the events. I wanted to hear more about the situation of Japanese women.

Take my review with a grain of salt, I don’t usually read historical fiction, but I picked this up because I do like women’s stories and I am interested in the impact of occupation on the Japanese national character. Maybe historical fiction isn’t meant to be critical or make you think. This just made me wish I was reading Sully’s story because he connected with Japanese people, and changed as a result of that knowledge: “She’s not a character in a storybook, Mare.” Perhaps that in itself is a comment on gender... once you're pregnant in a time period that shames and oppresses unmarried pregnant women, maybe you aren't allowed the room to grow about anything but what's happening within?

With thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Australia for sending me a copy to read.

[Ellen (the_plentiful_library) · Rating 4 out of 5]

🄱🄾🄾🄺 🅁🄴🅅🄸🄴🅆 The Occupation by Chloe Adams
𝕄𝕪 ℝ𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘: 4/5 ☆

I thoroughly enjoyed The Occupation it was essentially two stories in one. Firstly it was the story of how Mary came to be agreeing to give her unborn child to her cousin Tess in the opening scenes of the book.

It was also a story about Mary's time in post war Japan living and working in a city called Kure. While there Mary meets an Australian journalist named Sully. As Mary experiences Japan on outings and sees the devastation the bombing of Hiroshima has had on the locals she starts to have her preconceived notions of the war, Japan and its people challenged.

This is a deep and emotional story and it's really thoughtfully written. I enjoyed following Mary as she grappled with her emotions when her peers, her government and the media were constantly telling her how she should feel about Japan and giving up her baby but it was so at odds with how she was actually feeling.
I liked seeing Mary explore these emotions and become stronger in her convictions as the story went on.

Thank you to Penguin Australia for the gifted copy of The Occupation to read and review 🙌🏼

[Ashleigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to Penguin for my gifted copy of this book.

The Occupation follows Mary as she leaves Australia to work as a nurse in post-World War II allied occupied Japan. This is a section of history I am unfamiliar with as it skirts around the more popular war narratives. Chloe Adams does explore the attitudes of both the Japanese people and the allied forces post bombing of Hiroshima, although she focuses mainly on the allied perspective. I found that Adams could have lent more into the horrors of Hiroshima but the narrative was sent elsewhere. The plot itself has puzzled me, there almost seems to be two separate stories within this book and neither of them were fleshed out enough. The pacing of this book took a while to steady out and I found it more immersive as the narrative continued. The writing was haunting and easy to consume, The Occupation was easy to breeze through.

This novel was based on Adams's own grandmother's experience and is her debut novel. Although executed well I feel like there needed to be some redirection. 3/5 stars.

[Jacki van de Schoor · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Occupation was a good read. I mostly enjoyed it. It had some tense moments and real emotional depth, and it told the story well from the Australian perspective.

I was drawn in quickly, and I found it hard to put down, I read it in one sitting.

I really liked both Mary and Sully. Mary was interesting, relatable, and complex. She definitely made some odd choices, some of which left me either scratching my head or raging internally.
Mary was far too considerate of others' feelings. She always seemed to put herself last.
Sully was also an interesting character. He was caring and intelligent, too.

I found the majority of the story to have a lot of heart and depth, but there were parts here and there that ended abruptly or didn't have the same emotion. Especially nearer the end, with the scenes with Mary and Tess.

Overall, it was a beautifully written novel that had a powerful impact.

4 stars from me. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thanks to Netgalley, Penguin Random House Australia, and Chloe Adams for the chance to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Caren · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most compelling aspect of this historical novel was its exploration of the Australian biased attitudes towards the Japanese and their culture after WW2, particularly their views on Hiroshima and the impact of the atomic bomb. Focused on Mary, an Aussie working after the war within the occupied Hiroshima prefecture, the author follows her perceptions and changes of attitude, as well as her personal relationships and growth within the three years she was stationed at Kure. Mary’s friendships and love of Australian journalist, Sully, are a major part of the narrative, but I was more interested in the existential questions raised by the author as Sully provides Mary with a new perspective on the occupation and the ravaged Japanese.

[Courtney · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was very underwhelming. I appreciate that the author was telling the story of her own family but, in doing so, she centred the voices of the Australian occupiers. Mary starts to challenge her beliefs about the Japanese but then suddenly leaves and the book becomes about something else all together. I didn’t like the characters, I didn’t like the white saviourism, there wasn’t much plot and I didn’t care how it ended. The writing was decent and it’s always interesting to learn about a time in history I didn’t know about.

[Nat · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't study a lot of history, so this novel gave me a window to Australia's involvement in Japan post WWII.

It was brilliantly written, following the story of Mary and her relationship with a journalist, Sullivan. With Sullivan, Mary was introduced to the horrors of Hiroshima and the devastating effects it left behind for the Japanese people.

This novel is quite confronting and sometimes profound.

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, not the easiest to read in some parts, but if everyone sidesteps the not so nice events in life, people will never learn. Descriptions of Hiroshima after the bomb dropped are stark but so evocative. I liked the perspective of looking at the bombing as other than a glorious defeat. As usual, history is written by the victors with no thought to the vanquished.

The story of Mary the main character, how she learns about herself in so many ways is handled well.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really descriptive writing and interesting subject (Australians and others in post war occupation). What was articulately delivered was the racism still evident at times and the lack of empathy for the ordinary person on either side of wars. An important element of the book but at times I felt I was reading a travelogue rather than a novel. However a great, perceptive wordsmith. Will look to read future novels.

[Joan · Rating 3 out of 5]

young single Australian woman arrives in Kure Japan as part of the Occupation forces. Interestingly the author states how she doesn't write much about the Japanese perspective. Her meeting with a journalist who brings a new perspective to the bombing of Hiroshima and the war trials.
an interesting story

[Mary Churchill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have been a better read. Very repetitive and boring at times. Did not think the ending added to the reading experience. It was a book of its time however more could have been achieved with this story.

[Jillian · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappointing book. I have never read a book set in Japan in the aftermath of WW2 but this only scratched the surface. It could have gone so much further if the author had stayed in Japan, or more fully explored Joe’s story. Mary was an unlikeable character, which didn’t help.

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written, thought provoking and deeply moving.

[Ann Koenig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel reflects life for young women in the 50s - such as great story.

[Angelynn23 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting read and thought provoking.

Thank you NetGalley and to the publisher Penguin Random House Australia for the ARC.

[Gavan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quiet yet brutal love story set in occupied Japan. Nicely crafted in a gentle way - but it is hard to get away from the dperessing impact of war on the people (on both sides) and environment. Other themes include misogyny, family and unwedded babies.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written tale with rich descriptions of a time in history I knew very little about. Chloe has explored many sensitive issues of the time with grace and empathy. A brilliant first novel.

[Emilie (emiliesbookshelf) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in 1948, in the Japanese city of Kure, now occupied by Australians who have established an occupation there after the Hiroshima bombing

Mary is stationed in Kure and meets Australian journalist Sully who challenges her preconceived notions of the war

Now out of her comfort zone, she sees first hand the devastation the war brought this quiet town, while watching the expats live their lives to fullest with no second thoughts for the struggling locals

Writing from her grandmother’s experience, the author weaves an interesting, well researched story taking you back to the 1940s

Thank you so much Penguinbooks for my gifted copy of this wonderful debut

[Joe Murray · Rating 2 out of 5]

boring and lame - prose was good but structure went nowhere, MC was rarely more interesting than the characters that surrounded her and the author couldn’t manage to reconcile the sentimental romanticism of the plot with the deep horror and complexity that comes when addressing WW2 Japan, resulting in some jarring tonal swings.

4/10

[EmG ReadsDaily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quiet historical story, exploring impossible choices.

I love the author's note at the beginning of the book, in particular 'Writing historical fiction is a game of balance - finding the measure of accuracy, sensitivity and plausibility. My intention was to confront the truth of that time while also carrying the weight of my words purposefully, acknowledging that the erasure of unpalatable histories also erases the experiences of those who suffered through those histories.'