About Tempo 3: Harbour of Secrets

The Tempo series follows a group of friends and lovers who remain linked from youth throughout their lives, their relationships tested by the dramatic events of the 1930s to 1970s. The stories are narrated by four of the characters as they negotiate their own passions, hopes and sorrows, their perspectives entangled with each other to create a mosaic of the times. Harbour of Secrets takes place between 1948 and 1957, and is set in Australia.

The war may be over, but the reckoning is not. How do you reconcile an era that gave — and stole — so much?

It's the hip 1950s on Sydney's shimmering harbour, but it’s not easy for Eliza and Harry Bell to keep the past safely forgotten. Hard for their friends too.

Billie Quinn is no longer a pilot. She works the radio at Sydney’s seaplane base, and is sure she’ll cope when her old lover Pete turns up with a new wife. But Billie’s only ever had one weakness.

Married Tina keeps secrets with — and from — beguiling Jimmy Kelso. She runs his jazz club Tempo at shady Kings Cross, but has yet to discover the exchange of gifts between criminals is a finely calibrated art.

Lovers Yvonne and Klara hope for a new life beside the blue harbour. But then, when Yvonne publishes Harry’s wartime memoir, no one can postpone the reckoning.

Secrets are easy to keep. At first.

The first volume of the Tempo trilogy is Testing the Limits, which is set in Australia, Britain and Europe in the years 1929 to 1936. The second is Embers at Midnight, which is set in Britain, Asia and Australia in the years 1937 to 1945. *NEW* Tempo 4: Shadows in Jade takes place in Australia's turbulent Vietnam era during the late sixties.