In 1882, a group of Romanian Jews, fleeing religious persecution, bought land in Palestine and, with later help from the Rothschild family, founded the town of Zikhron Ya’akov. It is here in the years just before The Great War that we meet Shoshana Adelstein, elder daughter of a farmer whose vineyards contribute to the local wine making industry. After a love affair that ends unhappily, she marries a wealthy Turkish businessman, and moves to Constantinople.

1915 finds her bored, restless and stifled in a loveless marriage, but with her adopted country at war with Britain, France and Russia, she is anxious about her people in Palestine and, deceiving her husband, boards a train to Haifa. What she sees – displaced Armenian Christians being harried and beaten by Turkish soldiers –  as the train trundles over the Anatolian plateau, shapes the rest of her life. On her return to Zikhron Ya’akov and appalled by what she has witnessed from the train window, Shoshana envisages that after the Armenians, the Jews living across the Ottoman empire will be next, and she vows to take action.

Together with her brother Nathan and her lover, Eli, Shoshana creates an intelligence network to gather information on Turkish troop movements, defensive works, logistics and troop morale. Eventually, contact is made with the British administration in Cairo, but as Shoshana’s network expands, its vulnerability to betrayal increases exponentially. I can take or leave some of the more frothy romantic sections of this book, but when Shoshana reconnects (they had met briefly before the war) with a certain young army officer called Thomas Edward Lawrence, the spark (for me) was lit.

Lawrence is in Cairo with his colleague, archaeologist – and intelligence agent – Leonard Woolley, and they are determined to disrupt the Turks in every way possible. History hands us so many ironies: Lawrence and the Jewish intelligence agents have a common enemy in the Turks, of course, but look for totally incompatible outcomes. Lawrence has promised an Arab homeland to the tribesmen he leads, while Shoshana and Nathan want a land where Jews can prosper.

The best fiction closely shadows real life and, in both reality and imagination, the worst betrayals come from within. Not from a snarling enemy, but from those once thought to be friends. The Wild Date Palm is a chastening example of how easily loyalty can be corrupted. The title of the book is deeply significant as, in the last chapter, Diane Armstrong slows us that life can truly spring from death, and that despair can be the mother of hope.

The slaughter of Armenian Christians before and during The Great War is a matter of historical record,  Two decades later, another horrific act of genocide occurred and Danuta Julia Boguslawski, born in 1939 in Kraków, Poland, is well qualified to write about such things. She and her family survived the war and, in 1948, they emigrated to Australia. Now, writing as Diane Armstrong, with a long and successful career as a writer behind her, she has written a novel of great power and compassion, set in a time of turmoil and unimaginable cruelty. Published by HQ fiction, The Wild Date Palm is available now.