Philosophical young conscript Bob Sten, is assigned the seemingly impossible task of searching for and disarming booby traps in the grounds of a French colonial manor set in an isolated rubber plantation north-east of Saigon.

Little does he know his life is about to be changed forever by an obsessive love affair with the estate owner Adele Bonnet — a sophisticated woman thirty years his senior.

Spanning four decades this epic saga delves into the past of the enigmatic Bonnet to a time when she was the same age as the young Sten. A British Secret Intelligence Service operative during the closing months of the Spanish Civil War and a Special Operations Executive agent during WWII, she gambles her own life for those of strangers and is pushed to her physical and psychological limits simply to survive.

Based on real events, the first volume of The Conscript Diaries begins a unique yet universal saga about the savagery of war, the failings and nobility of the human condition and ultimately, the power of love.