Search results for ""author thomas keneally""

In a novel of breathtaking reach and inspired imagination, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's Ark tells the stories of two men who have much in common. What separates them is 42,000 years.Shade lives with his second wife amid their clan on the shores of a bountiful lake. A peaceable man, he knows that when danger threatens, the Hero ancestors will call on him to kill, or sacrifice himself, to save his people.Over 40,000 years later, Shade's remains are unearthed near the now dry Lake Learned in New South Wales. The sensational discovery fascinates Shelby Apple, a documentary film maker who tracks the controversies it provokes about who the continent's first inhabitants were and where Shade's bones belong.Shelby goes on to follow his own heroes to the battlefields of Eritrea and the Rift Valley where Homo sapiens sprang from. When he, too, faces mortality and looks back on his passions, ideals and sorely tested marriage, Learned Man stands as an enduring spirit, a fellow player in the long, ever-evolving story of humankind.

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The story of Joan of Arc has always held a special fascination for writers - among them Voltaire, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw and Jean Anouilh. Here Thomas Keneally transforms the legend, presenting a Joan who is at once a tough radical, an instinctive soldier, a nagging prophet and a touchingly vulnerable girl - a haunting and compelling heroine framed by the tumultuous times in which she lived.

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'Exceptionally good...a master storyteller' Allan Massie, Scotsman'Both an absorbing wartime thriller and a thoroughly convincing study of grief' Sunday TimesIn 1943, when Grace and Leo Waterhouse married in Australia, they were part of a young generation ready to sacrifice themselves to win the war, while being confident they would survive.Sixty years on, as Grace recounts what happened to her doomed hero, she can say what she suspected then: that for many men, bravery is its own end. The tale she tells is one of great love, lost innocence, a charismatic but unstable Irish commander, dashing undercover missions against the Japanese in Singapore, and - in her eyes - reckless, foolhardy exploits. As fresh details continue to emerge, Grace is forced to keep revising her picture of what happened to Leo and his fellow commandoes - until she learns about the final piece in the jigsaw, and an ultimate betrayal. As absorbing as it is thought-provoking, this timely novel poses unsettling questions about what drives men to battle and heroic deeds, and movingly conveys the life-long effect on those who survive them.

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In 1915, two spirited Australian sisters join the war effort as nurses, escaping the confines of their father's dairy farm and carrying a guilty secret with them. Used to tending the sick as they are, nothing could have prepared them for what they confront, first in the Dardanelles, then on the Western Front. Yet they find courage in the face of extreme danger and become the friends they never were before. And eventually they meet the kind of men worth giving up their precious independence for - if only they all survive.At once epic in scope and extraordinarily intimate, The Daughters of Mars brings the First World War to vivid life from an unusual perspective. Profoundly moving, it pays tribute to the men and women who voluntarily risked their lives for peace.

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Schoolboy narrator Daniel Jordan, growing up in working-class Sydney during the Second World War, is confused by a world in which the religious dogma of his school conflicts with the communism of his family's terrifying neighbour, the 'Comrade'. Refreshingly unsentimental, this is the funny, ultimately tragic story of a boy struggling to understand a world in which concepts like innocence and guilt, good and evil are clearly open to interpretation.

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'When I was born in 1935 I grew up, despite depression and World War II, with a primitive sense of being fortunate . . . The Utopian strain was very strong . . . if we weren't to be a better society, if we were simply serfs designed to support a system of privilege, what was the bloody point?'Tom Keneally has been observing, reflecting on and writing about Australia and the human condition for well over fifty years. In this deeply personal, passionately drawn and richly tuned collection he draws on a lifetime of engagement with the great issues of our recent history and his own moments of discovery and understanding.He writes with unbounded joy of being a grandparent, and with intimacy and insight about the prospect of death and the meaning of faith. He is outraged about the treatment of Indigenous Australians and refugees, and argues fiercely against market economics and the cowardice of climate change deniers. And, he introduces us to some of the people, both great and small, who have dappled his life.Beautifully written, erudite and at times slyly funny, A Bloody Good Rant is an invitation to share the deep humanity of truly great Australian.

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'God save all here.'Summer, 1847. People are getting used to the corpses lying by the road and along the ditches. For John Mitchel - lawyer, journalist, activist, politician - the word 'famine' will forever conjure the hollowed faces of Ireland's dead, the liquid Irish of the past now mute on their tongues.Propelled by disgust at the injustice, Mitchel will do all he can to fight for the destitute, the starved, the forgotten. His odyssey will take him all the way to America - that land of promise - but it will draw him into a terrible paradox. He is trying to save lives - in doing so, will he betray the very people he is trying to protect?In Fanatic Heart, Booker Prize winner Thomas Keneally takes on one of the most controversial figures of the fight for Irish independence to wrestle with the conflicts at the centre of a complicated legacy. 'One of the world's greatest writers.' Spectator'He writes with tenderness and pathos.' Irish Times'A grand master of historical fiction.' Mail on Sunday'He succeeds, with touches of brilliance, in bringing to life characters in more detail than history ever possibly could.' Sydney Morning Herald

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With his genial air of an Australian innocent, Jacko Emptor is New York's most public trespasser, invading people's homes at random for a live television show. Until he undertakes the televised hunt for a missing woman and, finally, meets a barrier even he will not transgress. The dramatic tale of Jacko's exploits probes the dubious ethics behind some television programmes and illuminates how a civilized society can harbour appalling evil.

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Sydney, 1942, and in a nation threatened by a Japanese invasion, with husbands absent and sleek GIs present, a spirit of recklessness takes hold. Frank Darragh, an impressionable young priest, finds the line between saving others' souls and losing his own begins to blur as he becomes entangled with an attractive married woman, a ménage a trois, and a charismatic American sergeant.

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'A powerful and subtle writer...a remarkable novel' Spectator'Chilling and tragic' Ruth RendellIn the waning years of the Edwardian era, a group of gentlemen wait out a raging blizzard in the perpetual darkness of the Antarctic winter, poised for a strike at the South Pole. As the storm lifts, a new challenge faces Captain Sir Eugene Stewart - to discover which of his twenty-five carefully chosen men has become a murderer. The quest for adventure has become a quest for justice.

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In turn-of-the-century Australia, Tim Shea supports his young family by running a general store in a remote riverside town, where he finds the same hypocrisy and snobbery which made him emigrate from Ireland, and suffers a series of misfortunes which take him to the brink of disaster. Capturing the spirit of the times, this is the mesmerising tale of a flawed hero whose stubborn integrity is nearly his undoing.

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The extraordinary tale of Oskar Schindler, the Aryan who saved hundreds of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland, is now legendary, but as Tom Keneally reveals in this absorbing memoir, luck and the dogged persistence of one of 'Schindler's Jews' were vital in bringing it to the world's attention through his Booker Prize-winning novel, SCHINDLER'S ARK and the subsequent film, SCHINDLER'S LIST.Entertaining, inspiring and filled with anecdotes about the many people involved, from the survivors Keneally interviewed to Steven Spielberg and Liam Neeson, Searching for Schindler gives a revealing insight into a writer's mind and the creation of a modern classic. It also traces what happened in the decades after the war to Schindler, his wife, and the people they rescued - including Leopold Pfefferberg, who made it his mission to repay his priceless debt to Schindler. Above all, it sheds renewed light on a fascinatingly flawed man, and an instance of exceptional humanity amid the greatest inhumanity mankind has known.

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On the edge of a small town in New South Wales, far from the battlefields of the Second World War, lies a prisoner-of-war camp housing Italian, Korean and Japanese soldiers. For their guards and the locals, many with loved ones away fighting, captive or dead, it is hard to know how to treat them - with disdain, hatred or compassion? Alice, a young woman leading a dull life on her father-in-law's farm, is one of those with a husband held prisoner in Europe. When Giancarlo, an Italian POW and anarchist, is assigned to work on the farm, she hopes that being kind to him will somehow influence her husband's treatment. What she doesn't anticipate is how dramatically Giancarlo will expand her outlook and self-knowledge. But what most challenges Alice and the town is the foreignness of the Japanese inmates and their culture, which the camp commanders fatally misread. Mortified by being taken alive, they plan an outbreak, to shattering and far-reaching effect.In a career spanning half a century, Tom Keneally has proved a master at exploring ordinary lives caught up in extraordinary events. With this gripping and profoundly thought-provoking novel, inspired by a notorious incident in 1944, he once again shows why he is celebrated as a writer who 'looks into the heart of the human condition with a piercing intelligence that few can match' - Sunday Telegraph.

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On the edge of a small Australian town, far from the battlefields of the Second World War, a camp holds thousands of Japanese, Italian and Korean prisoners of war. The locals are unsure how to treat the 'enemy', though Alice Herman, whose young husband is himself a prisoner in Europe, becomes drawn to the Italian soldier sent to work on her father-in-law's farm. The camp commander and his deputy, each concealing a troubled private life, are disunited. And both fatally misread their Japanese captives, who burn with shame at being taken alive. The stage is set for a clash of cultures that has explosive, far-reaching consequences.

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When Palestinian guerillas hijack a flight from New York to Frankfurt, they find an Aboriginal dance troupe among the passengers. Similarly dispossessed of their land, whose side will the Aborigines take? Conflicts of loyalty, terror and revolutionary fervour form the explosive ingredients in this riveting and thought-provoking novel.

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On the island of St Helena in the south Atlantic ocean, Napoleon spends his last years in exile. It is a hotbed of gossip and secret liaisons, where a blind eye is turned to relations between colonials and slaves.The disgraced emperor is subjected to vicious and petty treatment by his captors, but he forges an unexpected ally: a rebellious British girl, Betsy, who lives on the island with her family and becomes his unlikely friend.Based on fact, Napoleon's Last Island is the surprising story of one of history's most enigmatic figures and a British family who dared to associate with him. It is a tale of vengeance, duplicity and loyalty, and of a man whose charisma made him dangerous to the end.

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A novel of breath-taking reach and inspired imagination, drawing on the discovery of Australia's oldest known human inhabitant. Shade lives peaceably with his second wife on the shores of a bountiful lake. Conscious of ageing but still vigorous, when called on by the spirit ancestors to sacrifice himself for the sake of his clan, he knows he must obey. Over 40,000 years later, Shade's skeleton is unearthed near the now dry Lake Learned in New South Wales. The sensational discovery of so-called 'Learned Man' rewrites the history of Australia and fuels the Aboriginal people's claim to be the land's rightful owners - and has a lasting impact on a young documentary maker, Shelby Apple, who gets caught up in the fate of Learned's remains. When Shelby, too, faces mortality and looks back on his life, Learned stands as an enduring spirit, a fellow player in the long, ever-evolving story of humankind.

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'God save all here.'Summer, 1847. People are getting used to the corpses lying by the road and along the ditches. For John Mitchel - lawyer, journalist, activist, politician - the word 'famine' will forever conjure the hollowed faces of Ireland's dead, the liquid Irish of the past now mute on their tongues.Propelled by disgust at the injustice, Mitchel will do all he can to fight for the destitute, the starved, the forgotten. His odyssey will take him all the way to America - that land of promise - but it will draw him into a terrible paradox. He is trying to save lives - in doing so, will he betray the very people he is trying to protect?In Fanatic Heart, Booker Prize winner Thomas Keneally takes on one of the most controversial figures of the fight for Irish independence to wrestle with the conflicts at the centre of a complicated legacy. 'One of the world's greatest writers.' Spectator'He writes with tenderness and pathos.' Irish Times'A grand master of historical fiction.' Mail on Sunday'He succeeds, with touches of brilliance, in bringing to life characters in more detail than history ever possibly could.' Sydney Morning Herald

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By the Booker-winning author of Schindler's Ark, a vibrant novel about Charles Dickens' son and his little-known adventures in the Australian Outback.In 1868, Charles Dickens dispatches his youngest child, sixteen-year-old Edward, to Australia. Posted to a remote sheep station in New South Wales, Edward discovers that his father's fame has reached even there, as has the gossip about his father's scandalous liaison with an actress. Amid colonists, ex-convicts, local tribespeople and a handful of eligible young women, Edward strives to be his own man - and keep secret the fact that he's read none of his father's novels.Conjuring up a life of sheep-droving, horse-racing and cricket tournaments in a community riven with tensions and prejudice, the story of Edward's adventures also affords an intimate portrait of Dickens' himself. This vivacious novel is classic Keneally: historical figures and events re-imagined with verve, humour and compassion.

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Father Frank Docherty has had his run-ins with the church authorities: in the early 1970s, he was expelled from the Sydney archdiocese for preaching against the Vietnam War and has lived in Canada as a monk ever since. Twenty-five years later, back in Australia to give a lecture about celibacy and paedophile priests, he comes across an ex-nun who claims to have been abused by a now eminent cleric. If Docherty is to help her, he will be up against an institution bent on avoiding scandal. What is more, the accused man's sister is the woman Docherty nearly broke his vows for long ago. This searing, impassioned novel captures the Catholic Church at a pivotal moment: when it tried to silence its victims, wreaking lasting damage not only on innocents but on itself.

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The story of modern Australia begins in eighteenth-century Britain, where people were hanged for petty offences but crime was rife, and the gaols were bursting. From this situation was born the Sydney experiment, with criminals perceived to be damaging British society transported to Sydney, an 'open air prison with walls 14,000 miles thick'.Eleven ships were dispatched in 1781, and arrived in Australia after eight hellish months at sea. Tom Keneally describes the first four years of the 'thief colony' and how, despite the escapes, the floggings, the murders and the rebellions, it survived against the odds to create a culture which would never have been tolerated in its homeland but which, in Australia, became part of the identity of a new and audacious nation.By the author of Schindler's Ark, since made into the internationally acclaimed film, Schindler's List.

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The result of a collaboration between Sydney’s Macquarie University and International PEN Sydney Centre, and funded by the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australian Research Council, The Literature of Australia gathers the most distinctive and most significant of the nation’s writing. Highlights include: Coverage of over two hundred years of literature in all genres, from the 1700s to the present, and over 500 entries from 307 different authors, including writing by Aboriginal authors from the early colonial period to the present. Work from contemporary authors of international renown, including Shirley Hazzard, Peter Carey, David Malouf, Les Murray, Alexis Wright, and Kate Grenville. Biographical details about the authors of the works selected, an introductory essay, major essays setting the works in their historical context, and suggestions for further reading. The Literature of Australia offers readers of all kinds a window into the myriad ways of being Australian.

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The Hachette Essentials series comprises a collection of titles that are regarded as modern classics. A carefully and lovingly curated selection of distinctive, ground-breaking fiction and non-fiction titles published since 1950. Timeless. Relevant. Passionate. Unified as a series - distinctive as books. A good book is great. A great book is essential.In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy-drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mercy.Thomas Keneally's novel first brought the story of Oskar Schindler to international attention in 1982, when it won the Booker Prize. It was made by Steven Spielberg into the Oscar-winning film Schindler's List in 1993, the year Schindler and his wife were named Righteous Among the Nations.

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Booker Prize winner Thomas Keneally transports us into the life of John Mitchel, one of the most controversial figures of the fight for Irish independence.Bringing us on a vivid, page-turning odyssey from Mitchel's revolutionary origins in the depths of the Great Famine, through exile and a troubling political evolution, the master of historical fiction wrestles with the conflicts at the centre of a complicated legacy.''One of the world's greatest writers.'' SpectatorEnlightening . . . Keneally's descriptive gift comes into exquisite play.' TLSA gripping and resonant story.' Financial Times

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The gripping story of one woman's odyssey into the Australian outback away from tragedy and towards regaining control over her life.'Marvellous, surprising, exhausting' Observer'A remarkable, powerful novel, all the more exciting for the exotic background so vividly described' Daily ExpressA young woman once told Thomas Keneally her life story. It was to lodge in his mind and haunt his imagination, becoming the kernel for this enthralling and emotive novel. It tells of a marriage that becomes a nightmare, of a distraught woman's flight, actual and symbolic, into the Australian interior, a story of pursuit, tragic accident and a final, strange catharsis.

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During the Eritrean struggle for independence from Ethiopia, four Westerners travel under Eritrean rebel escort through a land of savage beauty and bitter drought towards the ancient capital of Asmara. Each is on a personal mission, all are irrevocably changed as they bear witness to the devastation of war as well as to the Eritreans' courage and humanity in the face of constant attack.

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By the author of Schindler's Ark and master storyteller, Thomas Keneally, a vibrant novel about Charles Dickens' son and his adventures in the Australian Outback.In 1868, Charles Dickens dispatches his youngest child to Australia. Like his brother Alfred before him, sixteen-year-old Edward is expected to learn to apply himself in what his father considers to be the new land of opportunity. Posted to a remote sheep station in New South Wales, Edward discovers that Charles Dickens' fame has reached even there, as has the gossip about his father's scandalous liaison with an actress. Amid colonists, ex-convicts, local tribespeople and a handful of eligible young women, Edward strives to be his own man - and keep secret the fact that he's read none of his father's novels.Conjuring up a life of sheep-droving, horse-racing and cricket tournaments in a community riven with tensions and prejudice, the story of Edward's adventures also affords an intimate portrait of Dickens' himself. This vivacious novel is classic Keneally: historical figures and events re-imagined with verve, humour and compassion.

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With a new introduction by Thomas Keneally.'The best novel of the Civil War since The Red Badge of Courage'NewsweekAs the Civil War tears America apart, General Stonewall Jackson leads a troop of Confederate soldiers on a long trek towards the battle they believe will be a conclusive victory. Through their hopes, fears and losses, Keneally searingly conveys both the drama and mundane hardship of war, and brings to life one of the most emotive episodes in American history.

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In 1789 in Sydney Cove, the remotest penal colony of the British Empire, a group of convicts and one of their captors unite to stage a play. As felons, perjurers and whores rehearse, their playmaker becomes strangely seduced. For the play's power is mirrored in the rich, varied life of this primitive land, and, not least, in the convict and actress, Mary Brenham.

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