Sins of The Fathers
John Byrnes | Paperback | July 2025
The brothers, the girl next door, a score to settle. In the early years of the twentieth century, Billy and Tommy Smith are growing up on the mean streets of Sydney's Millers Point. It's a hungry, hard-scrabble life, made even worse when their violent father returns home from a long stint in prison. The girl next door, Angeline Dubois, is an ambitious young woman running a small boarding house down at The Point. Circumstances beyond her control threaten to derail her big dreams for the future. In the wealthy eastern suburbs, Charles Davies is living an entirely different life, the beneficiary of his father's business acumen and insatiable, unyielding greed. Charles wants for nothing - except perhaps his father's approval. When an incident on The Point leads to the deaths of both Charles' and the Smith boys' fathers, a hatred is born that will follow the three men through their lives. In an epic saga taking them from Sydney to Gallipoli and the killing fields of France in World War I, to the melting pot of Darwin and the opal fields at Lightning Ridge, the men's paths all lead to one final destination: revenge. But in the end, what price must be paid for the sins of the fathers?
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Author Info
John Byrnes has worked bars and doors in pubs and clubs all over Australia, on fishing trawlers out of Darwin, and served in the Australian Army. Eventually, John put on a tie and studied economics, working for the Sydney Futures Exchange, Deutsche Bank and in financial services until 2023.
John started writing in 2015 and has a fascination with the darker aspects of the human condition; the addicted, the malevolent, the scarred. He cheers for the outsider, the slacker, the contrarian, the non-conformist.
Born in Sydney, John now lives on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales with his wife and three children.
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