The Japanese Diver's Daughter
A Broome Pearling Novel

About this book:

In 1973 Broome, the red dust still holds the secrets of a war the town has tried to forget. Nora Croft returns to her father’s failing pearling company to find Arthur Croft—a man forged by the brutal beauty of the deep water—desperately importing Japanese divers for the first time since the bombs fell on Roebuck Bay. But the arrival of the Miyoshi family isn't just business; it’s a debt come due. When Nora discovers a hidden grave dated February 1942—months after every Japanese national was supposedly interned—she unearths a conspiracy of silence that binds her father to a dead diver, a shattered helmet, and a pact made in the dark before Pearl Harbor.

As the massive tides of the Kimberley coast turn, Nora navigates a world where Aboriginal deckhands, Chinese shopkeepers, and the ghosts of the White Australia policy share the same salt-stained streets. With the company’s survival hanging on a single season’s catch, she must decide how deep she’s willing to dive into a past that men have killed to keep submerged. The ledger says one thing; the mud says another.

Atmospheric and utterly immersive, *The Japanese Diver’s Daughter* is a sweeping historical mystery where the lure of the pearl is as dangerous as the pressure at eighty fathoms. For readers of *The Light Between Oceans* and *The Pearl*, this is a story of betrayal, redemption, and the terrible weight of the promises we make to the dead.