Dorrigo Evans meets a woman named Amy at an Adelaide bookstore and shares an intense conversation about poetry.

Dorrigo realizes Amy is his uncle Keith's wife when he encounters her working at the King of Cornwall pub.

Dorrigo and Amy conduct a secret summer affair, growing increasingly reckless as their desire for each other overwhelms their caution.

Called to war early, Dorrigo spontaneously tells Amy he will return for her and that they will marry.

Dorrigo Evans arrives in Siam as an Australian prisoner of war and begins clearing teak forest for a Japanese railway.

The brutal Speedo work regime begins, Colonel Rexroth dies, and Dorrigo Evans assumes command of the surviving POWs.

Dorrigo refuses a stolen steak meant for himself and orders it sent to the dying men in the hospital hut.

Dorrigo Evans attempts to intervene as Japanese guards publicly beat Darky Gardiner before hundreds of assembled prisoners.

Darky Gardiner is found dead in the camp latrine, apparently having drowned after crawling there from the hospital.

Dorrigo receives a letter from Ella containing a newspaper clipping about a hotel explosion, leading him to believe Amy is dead.

Dorrigo Evans returns to Sydney after the war and marries Ella despite feeling no real love for her.

Dorrigo visits the widow of Jack Rainbow to deliver his war medals and has a painful conversation about love.

Dorrigo spots Amy alive on a Sydney bridge but chooses not to speak to her and watches her disappear.

Dorrigo smashes through a police roadblock and drives through an inferno to rescue Ella and his children from a firestorm.

A car of drunken teenagers collides with Dorrigo Evans at an intersection and he dies in hospital three days later.

Dorrigo Evans's life is shaped by two forces: a passionate affair with Amy Mulvaney and his experience commanding Australian prisoners of war in a Japanese camp. He meets Amy in a bookstore, discovers she is his uncle's wife, and carries on an affair that summer before shipping out to war. In the camp, Dorrigo assumes command after Colonel Rexroth dies and becomes the Big Fella, a figure of reluctant heroism for the surviving men. After the war, believing Amy died in a hotel explosion, he marries Ella and becomes a celebrated surgeon but never finds peace or happiness. In old age he glimpses Amy on a Sydney bridge but cannot bring himself to speak to her, and shortly before his death he rescues his family from a raging firestorm. He is killed in a random car accident and dies feeling that his life was only just beginning.

Dorrigo Evans's journey from love affair to war hero to tragic death.

Twelve-year-old Dorrigo earns the respect of older schoolboys by leaping to catch a football in the violent Kick to Kick game.

Dorrigo and Amy slow dance at a nightclub; she holds his hand and tells him they belong to each other tonight.

Keith calmly tells Amy he has known about her affair with Dorrigo from the very beginning.

Keith lies to Amy, telling her Dorrigo has died in the camp; a gas explosion then destroys the King of Cornwall hotel.

Australian POWs march to the Line for nearly a week, passing bloated corpses that line every road and path.

A concert is staged on a bamboo platform in the POW camp; Colonel Rexroth urges the men to face their ordeal as one.

Nakamura and Dorrigo play cards and drink whiskey; Nakamura refuses Dorrigo's request for a rest day, citing duty to the Empire.

Darky Gardiner shares his last meager food with the ailing Tiny Middleton despite his own desperate hunger and illness.

At Rabbit Hendricks's funeral pyre, Dorrigo and Bonox Baker argue heatedly over whether to burn Hendricks's sketchbook of camp horrors.

Colonel Kota raises his sword over Darky Gardiner's exposed neck on a jungle path but loses his nerve and walks away.

Nakamura reads his name listed as a wanted war criminal in a Tokyo newspaper and commits to living in hiding.

Jimmy Bigelow and fellow veterans smash the windows of Nikitaris's fish shop and carry the fish to the ocean to free them.

Nakamura builds a new life under a false name, marries a woman named Ikuko, and eventually reclaims his real identity.

Tom Evans reveals to Dorrigo that Darky Gardiner was his illegitimate son, making Darky Dorrigo's biological nephew.

Jimmy Bigelow, aged ninety, plays his bugle for his daughter and tells her the POWs were lucky to only have to suffer.

These events trace the secondary stories surrounding Dorrigo's central arc, from his childhood confidence to the camp's grinding horror and the lives broken by the war's aftermath. Amy and Dorrigo's courtship unfolds through a nightclub dance and a growing obsession neither can resist, while Keith's quiet awareness of the affair sets a tragic course. In the camp, the POWs endure the long march to the Line and witness acts of unexpected generosity alongside near-executions, as Nakamura and Dorrigo play cards and argue over the value of human life. After the war, former prisoners struggle with trauma, alcohol, and broken marriages, finding rare communion in a night of confession with a sympathetic fish-shop owner. The Japanese officers face their own reckoning: Nakamura reinvents himself in hiding, the Goanna is executed for war crimes, and a late revelation about Darky Gardiner's parentage reframes his death as a personal family tragedy for Dorrigo.

The lives shaped and broken by war, from camp friendships to survivor struggles.

Dorrigo's brother Tom returns from WWI and refuses to speak about the war, staring silently into a fire all night.

Amy removes her wedding ring before approaching a tall stranger in the bookstore, not understanding why she does it.

Back on leave, Dorrigo confesses his brief bookstore encounter to Ella as though it were an affair, shaken by his own feelings.

Dorrigo and Amy give in to their desire and have sex on a beach dune after weeks of resisting each other.

Amy tells Dorrigo about the pregnancy she and Keith ended before their marriage and how it destroyed their relationship.

The Goanna drags Darky Gardiner from the hospital while Dorrigo is mid-surgery on Jack Rainbow, forcing an impossible choice.

Jack Rainbow dies on the operating table when the stitches on his femoral artery burst and Dorrigo cannot stop the bleeding in time.

Rooster MacNeice discovers that the duck egg he believed Darky Gardiner had stolen was not actually his.

The Japanese abandon the completed Death Railway; it is stripped, sold for parts, and reclaimed by the jungle.

Nakamura kills a young boy to frame him for an American soldier's murder and uses stolen money to buy false identity papers.

A doctor friend tells Nakamura about live medical experiments performed on prisoners of war; Nakamura feels pride rather than horror.

Colonel Kota reappears and places a hand on Nakamura's neck at a job fair, making clear he has never forgotten him.

At a prestigious dinner, Ella Evans tells the assembled guests that her husband Dorrigo is the loneliest man in the world.

Amy Mulvaney, dying of cancer, asks only to be buried with the pearl necklace Dorrigo Evans once gave her.

After weeping alone in the jungle over the hundred men marching to their deaths, Dorrigo Evans sees a crimson flower growing in the mud.

This pool follows the pivotal decisions and revelations that give the novel its deepest meaning, beginning with the shadow of the First World War and ending with the image that haunts Dorrigo to his death. Amy's unexplained removal of her wedding ring before approaching Dorrigo signals a pull beyond her own understanding, while their eventual surrender on the beach marks the point of no return for both of them. In the camp, the impossible choice forced on Dorrigo during Rainbow's surgery and the escalation of Darky's beating show how small moments compound into catastrophe. Post-war revelations — Nakamura's pride over Japanese atrocities, Kota's quiet reappearance, and Amy's dying request — expose the private weight each character carries long after the fighting ends. Ella's public declaration of Dorrigo's loneliness and the abandoned railway's meaningless legacy strip away any remaining illusion of purpose or glory. The pool closes with the crimson flower growing in the camp mud, the image that binds Dorrigo's memory of Amy to the darkest night of his captivity.