Showing results by narrator "Humphrey Bower" in All Categories

On November 7, 1974, a young English nanny named Sandra Rivett was murdered in London's West End. Her employer, Lord Lucan, was named as her attacker. It was widely assumed he had mistaken her for his wife. Lord Lucan disappeared the night Sandra Rivett died and has not been seen since. Henry Kennedy lives on a mountain on the other side of the world. He is not who he says he is. Is he a murderer, or a man who can never clear his name? And is he the only one with something to hide?

Stan Parker, with only a horse and a dog for companions, journeys to a remote scrubby patch of land that he has inherited in the Australian hills. When the land is cleared enough for a rudimentary house to be built, Stan brings his new wife, Amy, to the wilderness. Together they struggle to establish a home for themselves and their growing family.

Spanning three generations‚ Capricornia tells the story of Australia's North. It is a story of whites and Aborigines and Asians‚ of chance relationships that can form bonds for life‚ of dispossession‚ murder and betrayal. In 1904 the brothers Oscar and Mark Shillingsworth‚ clad in serge suits and bowler hats‚ arrive in Port Zodiac on the coast of Capricornia. They are clerks who have come from the South to join the Capricornian Government Service.

Rossamund Bookchild has successfully negotiated the treacherous route to High Vesting. But even within the sturdy walls of the great city he is far from safe. For the path to becoming a Lamplighter is fraught with dangers – and not just from the dread monsters who lurk in the wilds. Rossamund will need all his wits to survive his training. And he must watch his back too, for enemies from his past are never far behind.

The Odd Angry Shot is the seminal account of Australian soldiers in the Vietnam War. Brief and bracing, tragic yet darkly funny, the novel is an award-winning commentary on Vietnam, following a close-knit group of knockabout SAS fighters: their friendships, homesickness and fears; and their practical jokes, drinking and fighting. Chronicling their experiences over one year, we learn that their enemy is not just the Vietcong, but their superiors, the mud and torrential rain, and boredom.

From the author of the classic novel Wake in Fright comes a chillingly brilliant short novel that's part Wolf Creek and part Duel. Fear Is the Rider is a nail-biting chase into the outback, towards the devil lurking at its centre. It was quite silent in the scrub. No breeze stirred the leaves and no bird moved, except for the kite hawks wheeling silently, eternally, high in the hot air. She smelt her attacker before she saw him.

Thomas Keneally pulls no punches in this powerful novel about the Catholic Church's attempts to cover up cases of child abuse, and a priest who decides help its innocent victims' fight to be heard. Expelled from the archdiocese of Sydney as a young priest for his outspoken views on the Vietnam...

Spirited away from Winstermill by the aristocratic monsterslayer, Europe, Rossamünd is still struggling with the truth of his origins. But self-doubt will have to wait as he plunges headlong into the fulgar’s day-to-day life of political manoeuvring, high society, and well-paid monster-hunting. Exposed to the seamier side of Brandenbrass society, Rossamünd finds himself facing the gravest dangers in his young life, and these will test his mettle and that of the Branden Rose in the ultimate battle against their enemies, the black-hearted schemers who would destroy them both.

On the last, cold Sunday of February 1859, Daniel Sickles shot his wife's lover in Washington's Lafayette Square, just across from the White House. This is the story of that killing and its repercussions. Thomas Keneally brilliantly recreates an extraordinary period, when women were punished for violating codes of society that did not bind men. And the caddish, good-looking Dan Sickles personifies the extremes of the era.

An escaped convict with a false passport, Lin flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter the city’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.

In this special prequel to Matthew Reilly’s The Tournament, Roger Ascham, the unorthodox tutor of Princess Elizabeth, is tasked by King Henry VIII with a most unusual and dangerous mission – tracking down a favourite prostitute of the King's who has gone missing.

They were never an obvious group of friends. Julian came from the most staid of county families. Jake's passage from unassuming suburbia to the dreaming spires of Oxford happened only by chance, and at great cost. And Adrienne, daughter of one of New York's wealthiest and most glamorous families, grew up more used to appearances in Vogue than to Oxford's cold and dusty lecture halls. When the three of them arrive at university, it is Julian's sister, Maggie, who brings them together.

In the Memorial Room is a brilliant black comedy by the celebrated author of An Angel at My Table. Harry Gill, a moderately successful writer of historical fiction, has been awarded the annual Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship - a 'living memorial' to the poet Margaret Rose Hurndell. He arrives in the small French village of Menton, where Hurndell once lived and worked, to write. But the Memorial Room is not suitable - it has no electricity or water. Hurndell never wrote here, though it is expected of Harry.

Love, sex, death, family, friendship, betrayal, tenderness, brutality, sacrifice and revelation. This incendiary collection of stories from acclaimed writer Christos Tsiolkas, best-selling author of The Slap and Barracuda, takes you deep into worlds both strange and familiar, and introduces you to characters who will never let you go and situations that will haunt you forever.

Thommo returns from Vietnam to an Australia that regards him as a mercenary guilty of war crimes. He begins to develop all kinds of physical and mental problems, and thinks it must only be him until he finds he is not alone. Ten mates, all who remain of his platoon who fought and died in the Battle of Long Tan, are affected the same way.

Two branches of the McAllister family lead very different lives on cattle stations in Central Australia. Rob, a stickler for correctness, manages a wealthy, company-owned property while his easygoing brother Sandy struggles to support his wife and son on an impoverished leasehold. When tragedy throws the families together, ultimately driving them even further apart, it's Sandy's young son Jim who suffers the most.

Towards the end of the Great Depression a young boy goes with his sister to stay at a farm while their mother is ill. There, during a scorching African summer, he witnesses a trial and punishment which will forever remind him of white men's cruelty to black people. The Night Country is a fable for all ages – a powerful account of the strength that lives within us all.

In remembrance of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the Nazi concentration camps, this award-winning, bestselling work of Holocaust fiction, inspiration for the classic film and “masterful account of the growth of the human soul” (Los Angeles Times Book Review), returns...

It must have been someone's idea of a joke. Too many offended egos back at headquarters, too many influential people unhappy with him in Nairobi. And yet, with his record, almost impossible to dismiss. So where had they sent Mollel? Straight to Hell. When Mollel, a former Maasai warrior turned detective, ends up in a small, fly-blown town on the edge of a national park, it looks as if his career has taken a nose-dive. His colleagues are a close-knit group and they have not taken kindly to a stranger in their midst. M

Cuteness is an area where culture and biology get tangled up. Seeing a cute animal triggers some of the most powerful psychological instincts we have – the ones that elicit our care and protection – but there is a deeper story behind the broad appeal of Japanese cats and saccharine greetings cards. Joshua Paul Dale, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of cuteness studies, explains how the cute aesthetic spread around the globe, from pop brands to Lolita fashion, kids' cartoons and the unstoppable rise of Hello Kitty.