Alli Parker Reclaiming OUR FAMILY STORY

THE AUTHOR WAS DRIVEN TO SHARE HER GRANDPARENTS' UNIQUE HISTORY IN HER FIRST BOOK

- Kylie Walters

Alli Parker first got the idea for her debut novel, At the Foot of the Cherry Tree, a fictionalised retelling of her grandparents' extraordinary love story, when she was just a child.

"I was 11 and reading a book written by a journalist in the '60s, and all the while I was just thinking, 'No, that's not my grandparents' [story] and I can do this much better,"" she explains to WHO. "It was just way too saccharine."

It's easy to see why the romance between Gordon Parker and Nobuko 'Cherry' Sakuramoto could become a little melodramatic in the telling. Their relationship did go on to change the course of Australian history. But there is also a lot of pain and hardship in the tale too.

Cherry was just 16 when she took a job as a housemaid at the Australian Army camp in Kure, Japan, in 1946 and met 18-year-old soldier Gordon. All of her family had been killed the year earlier.