Showing results by author "Tom Keneally" in All Categories

The 10th child of Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, known as Plorn, had consistently proved unable 'to apply himself ' to school or life. So aged 16, he is sent, as his brother Alfred was before him, to Australia. This is Tom Keneally in his most familiar terrain. Taking historical figures and events and reimagining them with verve, compassion and humour. It is a triumph.

How did Corporal Hitler's Luger from the First World War end up being the weapon that killed an IRA turncoat in Kempsey, New South Wales, in 1933? When an affluent Kempsey matron spots a young Aboriginal boy who bears an uncanny resemblance to her husband, not only does she scream for divorce, attempt to take control of the child's future and upend her comfortable life, but the whole town seems drawn into chaos.

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.

Naomi and Sally Durance are daughters of a dairy farmer from the Macleay Valley. Bound together in complicity by what they consider a crime, when the Great War begins in 1914 they hope to submerge their guilt by leaving for Europe to nurse the tides of young wounded. They head for the Dardanelles on the hospital ship Archimedes. Their education in medicine, valour, and human degradation continues on the Greek island of Lemnos, then on the Western Front. Here, new outrages - gas, shell-shock - present themselves.

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.

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.

Whilst living in exile on St Helena, Napoleon exerted an extraordinary influence on young Betsy Balcombe. How did she get from Napoleon's side to the Australian bush? Betsy Balcombe as a young woman lived with her family on St Helena. They befriended, served and were ruined by their relationship with Napoleon. To redeem the family's fortunes, William Balcombe, Betsy's father, betrayed Napoleon and accepted a job as the colonial treasurer of NSW, bringing his family with him.

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.

John Mitchel, Irishman, lawyer, journalist, activist and politician, is a complex character. Charged with treason in Ireland and tried by an English judge, he was snuck off mainland Ireland on the day he was charged to avoid a breakout and rebellion. He was transported initially to Bermuda, then to South Africa and then to Van Diemen's Land where as an Irishman he was supported by many and given a ticket of leave. He soon became a farmer and activist and was eventually secreted out of Australia to the USA, where it was felt he could be more active for the Irish cause.

Sydney, 1942 - the year of the fall of Singapore, the bombing of Darwin, and the surprise attack on Sydney Harbour by Japanese midget submarines. Australia is surely doomed to fall to the Japanese.... In the confessional, Father Frank Darragh hears how his community is changing - how the very real fear of invasion by the Japanese is leading people to challenge what the church teaches is right or wrong. Under the threat of death, people do things they would never dream of in peacetime.

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.

A novel adventuring between the pre-WWI Russian enclave in Brisbane and Tsarist Russia. From the author of Schindler's Ark, another tale of oppression and the triumph of determined peoples.Artem Samsurov, a charismatic protege of Lenin and an ardent socialist, reaches sanctuary in Australia after escaping his Siberian labour camp and making a long, perilous journey via Japan.

When Grace married Captain Leo Waterhouse in Australia in 1943, they were young, in love - and at war. Like many other young men and women, they were ready, willing and able to put the war effort first. They never seriously doubted that they would come through unscathed. But Leo never returned from a commando mission masterminded by his own hero figure, an eccentric and charismatic man who inspired total loyalty from those under his command.

In the bitter Antarctic winter of 1910, in the waning years of the Edwardian era, a group of gentleman adventurers wait out a raging blizzard in the close, perpetual darkness, 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, as what has begun as a probe for the bottom of the world becomes a probe for the bottom of man's soul.

As Father Stenner, Whitton's President, put it, 'a garish killing in a place for aspirants to the priesthood is, by the world's standards, an exotic crime'. Father Stenner's forebodings were, if anything, well short of the mark. The killer was apparently a madman whose first murder was to be merely the beginning of a bloody series. And into the maelstrom of violence and fear that he created came another and possibly even more sinister element, personified by a beautiful young woman named Agnes Grey.

Alec Ramsey is the survivor of a disastrous Antarctic expedition which abandoned his revered friend and leader of the party, Stephen Leeming. For 40 years, in the security of academia, Ramsey has nurtured with guilt his doubts about this incident. Now Leeming's body is, against all odds, to be exhumed from the Antarctic icecap, and Ramsey must confront his obsession and decide whether he really did - or can continue to - survive at all.

Jacko Emptor, Northern Territory born, brings Australian wildness to the television screens of America. Is America ready for him? Is he ready for America? Jacko, investigative reporter, exploits American innocence to break into living rooms and penetrate the heart's secrets. But these secrets make their claim on him too, especially the secrets of Sunny Sondquist, a child-woman missing in the American heartland. Follow Jacko as he exposes evil, falls from grace, and shows how television makes gods of some and fools of many.

Next door to us, crowded on the east and west by large houses, was the Mantles' narrow little brick place. It seemed to be subsiding crookedly into the earth like an ill-laid tombstone, and was a sunless warren, dim humidity in summer, dim moisture in winter. The laneway to its back door ran flush against our side wall, and beneath the Mantles' lounge-room window, a furze of moss grew a quarter of an inch thick on the mortar.