Dorrigo Evans is an Australian doctor who has found himself accidentally engaged to Ella Lansburg—he didn't mean to propose, but she got excited in a misunderstanding. The truth is that Dorrigo really loves another girl, Amy. Dorrigo doesn't know that Amy is actually married, to his uncle Keith no less. But he has his affair with Amy anyway, because after all, he is in the military and he is to be shipped to Japan soon.
Shortly after his deployment to Japan, Dorrigo is taken prisoner. The Koreans and Japanese share their war camps, so there are both Korean and Japanese soldiers working as guards. Dorrigo is a doctor with surgical experience, so he quickly rises in rank among the prisoners until he is a commanding officer in the POW camp. He personally mourns each and every death in the camp.
When Darky Gardiner is beaten by camp guards, Dorrigo approaches to help, but as he tries to help free Darky, the guards make him an offer—either he can help Darky, or he can let them beat Darky in exchange for quinine, a drug that could save other prisoners. He sacrifices Darky for the medicine, and Darky dies. Darky was his nephew, but he didn't know that at the time.
One day, Dorrigo hears that the pub owned by Amy and her father has exploded, and Amy is dead, among others. Many years later, Dorrigo tells us, he learns that Amy survived the explosion and was misidentified among the dead, but during the duration of the war, Dorrigo wrongly believes Amy has died, so when he returns from war, he simply marries Ella.
Ella and he have a frankly disappointing relationship and never really connect. Dorrigo re-establishes himself as a doctor in Australia. His later life is spent trying to rid himself of his tragic relationship to his trauma, and the sadness of marrying the wrong person. One day, a drunk teenager kills him in a car accident. The lives of his friends from the war camp are told, and we learn that many of the heinous guards were executed for their war crimes. Ella dies of cancer. The novel ends with the story of Japanese Commander Nakamura and his life-long struggle to overcome the guilt of his heinous behaviors as he spends his life in hiding from the world's governments.
