Barry Flanagan was born and educated in a coal mining town in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia. Having completed his schooling he worked in the industrial city of Newcastle before forging a career in the Defence Forces with the RAAF. After six years maintaining and servicing the French built, Mirage III, supersonic aircraft - including two of those years in Singapore and Malaya - he opted for a new career in the underground coal mining industry.

Thirty years later, with a Bachelor of Teaching under his belt, and countless hours of electrical and safety training communicated to his students, he decided to write a book. It was a fictional story of his experiences within an underground coalmine. It’s still in his top drawer, unpublished, ready and waiting for him to get a grip on it again.

Why? Because there were changes to his life and he fell in love with a woman whose own life had been turned upside down. She’d lost her husband to cancer who, along with his sister and parent’s, had an incredible story to tell about  oppression in their occupied country during World War II. Although fictional, the following two novels, The Undeclared War and Across The Green Border, are set in Kaunas, Lithuania, and were inspired by this family and based on facts. Much research for the novels was done in Lithuania. They hold drama, action and emotion - enough to make the author shed a tear during his writings.

He hopes you enjoy the journey.