High praise for Ann Harries' first novel, Manly Pursuits, from South African literary giants J.M. Coetzee and Doris Lessing on the back cover of this, her second work, is misleading, because this book falls way outside the category of literary great.

Harries has none of the talents of Lessing or Coetzee, and No Place for a Lady fails to either convincingly conjure up the horrors of South Africa's Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) or to evoke the beauty or majesty of its South African settings. In fact, so dreary is the first half that even the travel-weary crowd in the transit lounge of Bandar Seri Begawan Airport in Brunei turned out to be more interesting during a three-hour wait for a connecting flight.

No Place for a Lady is the story of three upper-class British women: ethereal, beautiful nurse Sarah Palmer, prototype heroine of romantic fiction; her raucous counterfoil Louise Ramsay, whose main interest in volunteering to nurse British troops in South Africa is in catching herself a well-connected husband; and the real-life Emily Hobhouse (1860-1926), an English social campaigner who exposed the appalling suffering of Boer women and children in British concentration camps during the war.

Then there's Patrick Donnelly, or Patch, Sarah's unlikely love interest, who was brought up by stick-wielding nuns in a convent orphanage in Cape Town and joins the war to prove himself a man.

Unfortunately, we're never convinced. He's a dull, spineless creature, although it's not clear that the author intended him to be so. He steals a bracelet from a Boer wife to give to Sarah, unblinkingly sets fire to Boer homesteads and farms as the British army pursues its devastating scorched earth policy to bring the wily Boer fighters to their knees, ignores news from home that his coloured girlfriend has had a baby, and sees Sarah as the very image of the Virgin Mary, on whom he longs to get his lusty paws.

Sarah and Louise are similarly unconvincing characters, whose diary entries prove a cheap trick for the author to fill in some of the details rather than give the two authentic voices.

The descriptions of battle fail to conjure up any real sense of terror or horror with their tangle of words, but Harries does better with scenes set in concentration camps in Bloemfontein, and the book finally engages the reader's interest and empathy with its story of Boer and black women and children suffering and dying of famine and disease as Sarah and Hobhouse wear themselves ragged trying to improve conditions and save lives. Nearly 50,000 men, women and children died in concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer war - mostly children.

Perhaps the best thing about No Place for a Lady is the interest it sparks in this period of history, and in Hobhouse, whose angelic role in a war so far from her cosy England earned her a place in the pantheon of heroes of South Africa, but who was reviled at home and refused permission to land in South Africa when she tried to return. Now to read her Boer war letters. That will be interesting.