Showing results by narrator "Paul English" in All Categories

Being the skipper of the cutter that carries all supplies and communications between Tasmania and Maria Island is a powerful position - and a deadly one. Monsarrat and Mrs Mulrooney are sent to Maria Island in January of 1826, the very early days of the penal settlement there, to solve the murder of Harefield - the man who sailed the government cutter between mainland Tasmania and Maria Island, bringing all supplies and correspondence and directives - all of which he made sure to read.

George Pell: leader of the Catholic Church in Australia, confessor to Tony Abbott. David Marr: the nation's leading biographer and investigative journalist. Cardinal George Pell is the most prominent Catholic leader in Australia at a time when the Church's handling of sexual abuse is being closely investigated. He is also the confessor of prime-minister-in-waiting Tony Abbott.

For three different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilisation rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men - sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war, and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.

“If the legendary Schindler’s List was not enough to showcase Thomas Keneally’s literary mastery, then [this novel] surely will” (New York Daily News) as the Booker Prize-winning author reimagines from all sides the drastic true events of the night more than one thousand Japanese POWs...

Henry Hallward, editor of the Sydney Chronicle, is a thorn in the side of the colonial administration. Hallward has been imprisoned several times for criminal libel and continues to edit his newspaper while incarcerated. This time, he’s in jail awaiting trial for suggesting that there have been some criminal financial dealings involving the CEO of the Australian Agricultural Company, a consortium of British landowners, some resident in the colony, some not, to whom the British government was giving a million acres of Australian land to develop.

Learned Man is the child of humankind as we know it, of those who are thought to have travelled from the Rift Valley in Africa and to ancient Australia. Shelby Apple is an acclaimed documentary maker. After making films about Learned Man’s discovery, in Vietnam and back home in the Northern Territory, Shelby turns his sights on Eritrea. He thinks this embattled society might represent a new cognitive leap, one that will reconcile our tenderness and our savagery, our reason and our emotions.

The story of the clipper ships, and the tens of thousands of migrants they brought to the Australian colony of the 19th century, is one of the world's great migration stories. For anyone who travelled to Australia before 1850, it was a long and arduous journey that could take as much as four months. With the arrival of the clipper ships, and favourable winds, the journey from England could be done in a little over half this time.

A biography of unprecedented expedition under sail, from Australia's master of maritime history. The role of the sailor through history should never be underestimated. Over centuries battles were won and new lands discovered and settled by their skills and nerve. Rob Mundle is back on the ocean to tell one of the great stories of an expedition under sail: the extraordinary eight-month, 17,000-nautical mile voyage of the First Fleet.

Not all murder victims are mourned, but the perpetrator must always be punished.... For Robert Church, superintendent of the Parramatta Female Factory, the most enjoyable part of his job is access to young convict women. Inmate Grace O'Leary has made it her mission to protect the women from his nocturnal visits, and when Church is murdered with an awl thrust through his right eye, she becomes the chief suspect.

In the battle-smoke and chaos of Gallipoli, a young New Zealand soldier helps a Turkish doctor fighting to save a boy’s life. Then a shell bursts nearby; the blast that should have killed them both consigns them instead to the same military hospital. Mahmoud is a Sufi. A whirling dervish, he says, of the Mevlevi order. He tells David stories. Of arriving in London with a pocketful of dried apricots. Of Majnun, the man mad for love, and of the saint who flew to paradise on a lion skin. You are God, we are all gods, Mahmoud tells David; and a bond grows between them.

In the battle-smoke and chaos of Gallipoli, a young New Zealand soldier helps a Turkish doctor fighting to save a boy’s life. Then a shell bursts nearby; the blast that should have killed them both consigns them instead to the same military hospital. Mahmoud is a Sufi. A whirling dervish, he says, of the Mevlevi order. He tells David stories. Of arriving in London with a pocketful of dried apricots. Of Majnun, the man mad for love, and of the saint who flew to paradise on a lion skin. You are God, we are all gods, Mahmoud tells David; and a bond grows between them.

Western Australia, the wheatbelt. Lew McLeod has been travelling and working with Painter Hayes since he was a boy. Shearing, charcoal burning - whatever comes. Painter made him his first pair of shoes. It’s a hard and uncertain life, but it’s the only one he knows. But Lew’s a grown man now. And with this latest job, shearing for John Drysdale and his daughter Clara, everything will change. Stephen Daisley writes in lucid, rippling prose of how things work, and why.

Western Australia, the wheatbelt. Lew McLeod has been travelling and working with Painter Hayes since he was a boy. Shearing, charcoal burning - whatever comes. Painter made him his first pair of shoes. It’s a hard and uncertain life, but it’s the only one he knows. But Lew’s a grown man now. And with this latest job, shearing for John Drysdale and his daughter Clara, everything will change. Stephen Daisley writes in lucid, rippling prose of how things work, and why.

Books 3 and 4 in The Tale of Shikanoko series. The second and final instalment of The Tale of Shikanoko: a bold epic of a fantastical medieval Japan from the creator of the global phenomenon Tales of the Otori, Lian Hearn, whose books have sold over four million copies worldwide. Against a background of wild forest, elegant castles, hidden temples and savage battlefields, the adventure that began with Emperor of the Eight Islands draws to its thrilling conclusion in Lord of the Darkwood, the second instalment of Lian Hearn's the Tale of Shikanoko.

A fast-paced, witty and gripping historical crime series from Tom Keneally and his eldest daughter, Meg. In the Port Macquarie penal settlement for second offenders, at the edge of the known world, gentleman convict Hugh Monsarrat hungers for freedom. Originally transported for forging documents passing himself off as a lawyer, he is now the trusted clerk of the settlement's commandant.

Kalu climbed high into a tree seeking the perfect leaf to roll into a pipe.... Softening one end in his mouth, he pressed down with his teeth to flatten the tube and blew. The sound, sweet and clear, rode the wind, snaking through the tree and down into the village. Set in the small Indian town of Hastinapore, we meet Kalu: just a young boy, without any family, living on the streets. As he plays his music, he doesn't realise there is a man resting against the trunk listening. And so Kalu and the healer meet, and Kalu’s life is changed forever.

This is your one chance. You have your secret dreams. Follow them! Make them come true ...In a poor village in northern China, a small boy is about to be taken away from everything he's ever known. He is so afraid, but his mother urges him to follow his dreams. For soon he will become a dancer, one of the finest dancers in the world...So begins The Peasant Prince, the true story of Li Cunxin's extraordinary life.

Written with the full co-operation of the Dalai Lama, this fascinating, up-to-date biography captures at once the public persona and enduring mystery behind one of the world's most important spiritual leaders.

A highly accomplished debut novel about our capacity for curiosity and our dangerous entitlement to it, which reminds us that the scariest ghosts aren’t those that go bump in the night but those that are born and create a place for themselves in the human soul. Jeff is dying. Haunted by memories and grappling with the shame of his desires, he runs away to remote Scotland with a piece of experimental tech that allows him to enter the mind of someone in the past. Instructed to only use it three times, Jeff - self-indulgent, isolated and deteriorating - ignores this advice.

In the first century AD, Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, one of our most distinguished novelists has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving work of fiction. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impate their dead and converse with the spirit world. But then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer.