In the winter of 1919, Lily and her three-year-old son, Ted, rush through the streets of Melbourne to welcome home Lily' s husband, Bert, who has spent the last four years fighting with the Light Horse in the Middle East. Twenty-three years later, as the same city awaits a Japanese invasion, Frankie, a young servicewoman on a night' s leave, meets an airman, Ed, at a dance. Almost three decades on, as Melbourne convulses with anti-war protests, single mother Fran prepares a funeral for her only son, a young conscript killed in Vietnam. And in the Morning is a novel about war and the ways in which its tragedies, both great and small, transform the intimate lives of the mothers, wives and lovers who must live with its consequences.