She had never met Tom Barnes but became interested in his past after hearing family legends and seeing some of the items he left behind. As she began to read his personal diaries she realised she was on to a good story, one she needed to tell.

Her book, The Sabotage Diaries, recounts Tom's exploits in Greece after he was co-opted by the British Special Operations for "Operation Harling" – a mission which required him, with little training, to parachute with a small party behind enemy lines and blow up a bridge used by General Erwin Rommel to supply the German troops in North Africa before the battle of El Alamein.

The book, written from Tom's first-person perspective, is based on the diaries he kept during the war, making it a work of "creative non-fiction". Based mainly on Tom's diaries, Ms Barnes rounded out the other details of the story through wider historical research and travels to Greece.

There she met with people who encountered Tom during his mission. She even acquired the phone number of a woman who knew Tom while he was posted in Egypt, when her husband mentioned the woman's name to a librarian in an Athens museum. They were then able to track her down and interview her.

In order to collect these oral stories Ms Barnes needed to speak the local language.

"I've been learning Greek at the Hellenic Club for nearly five years," she said.

A public servant, Ms Barnes faced a practical challenge in finding the time to write the book alongside her day job. She would write for about an hour before work each morning – a slow but steady pace.

Her purpose in bringing Tom's story to print was partly anecdotal, partly personal.

"It's a great story. It's a story that's not particularly well-known," she said.

"But also it was for my husband who didn't know his father – and [my husband's] sisters."

Her husband, Christopher, was too young to remember Tom while he was alive. Tom died in a car crash in 1952, as he returned home from an RSL meeting in Melbourne. Christopher was two at the time.

Writing the book and researching Tom's life had helped them to get to know who he was, Ms barnes said.

The Sabotage Diaries isn't Ms Barnes' first foray into the literary world. She holds a PhD in literature from the Australian National University and her first book, The Higher Self, about Australian poet Christopher Brennan, won the Walter McRae Russell award in 2007 for a work of outstanding literary scholarship on an Australian subject.

The Sabotage Diaries, by Katherine Barnes. (HarperCollins, $29.99.)