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Charlie Jardim has just trashed his legal career in a spectacular courtroom meltdown, and his girlfriend has finally left him. So when a colleague slings him a prosecution brief for the remote coastal town of Dauphin, Charlie reluctantly agrees to go. The case is murder. The victim was involved in illegal abalone trading and even more illegal drug trafficking. And the witnesses aren't talking. As Dauphin closes ranks around him, Charlie finds his interest in the law powerfully reignited.
In Canberra, a federal election looms and Cassius Calvert, Minister for Border Integrity, is facing a new hard-line policy regarding asylum-seekers. Off the Indonesian island of Dana, Isi Natoli, skipper of the Java Ridge, and a group of Australian surf tourists are anchored beside an idyllic reef. A few kilometres away, Roya and her mother are amongst the passengers fleeing persecution aboard the Talakar. When a storm breaks, these stories collide with chilling consequences....
In the long, hot summer of 1989, Ben and Fab are best friends. Growing up in a small country town, they spend their days playing cricket, yabbying in local dams, wanting a pair of Nike Air Maxes and not talking about how Fab's dad hits him or how the sudden death of Ben's next-door neighbour unsettled him. Almost teenagers, they already know some things are better left unsaid. Then a newcomer arrives in the Wimmera. Fab reckons he is a secret agent, and he and Ben stake him out.
Five women reluctantly leave the city for a challenging hike across the rugged Giralang Ranges as part of a corporate retreat. Only four come out the other side. Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk has a particularly keen interest in the whereabouts of the missing bushwalker. Alice Russell is the whistleblower in his latest case - and Alice knew secrets.
A story of desperation, resolution and small-town prejudice played out against the blistering extremes of life on the land. Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, a farmer turns his gun on his family and then himself. As questions mount and suspicion casts a long shadow over the parched town, specialist investigator Aaron Falk is forced to confront the community that rejected him 20 years earlier.
Winner of the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award. He hated the word retirement, but not as much as he hated the word village, as if ageing made you a peasant or a fool. Herein lives the village idiot. Professor Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, world expert on concrete and connoisseur of modernist design, has quarantined himself from life by moving to a retirement village.
Charlie Jardim has just trashed his legal career in a spectacular courtroom meltdown, and his girlfriend has finally left him. So when a colleague slings him a prosecution brief for the remote coastal town of Dauphin, Charlie reluctantly agrees to go. The case is murder. The victim was involved in illegal abalone trading and even more illegal drug trafficking. And the witnesses aren't talking. As Dauphin closes ranks around him, Charlie finds his interest in the law powerfully reignited.
In Canberra, a federal election looms and Cassius Calvert, Minister for Border Integrity, is facing a new hard-line policy regarding asylum-seekers. Off the Indonesian island of Dana, Isi Natoli, skipper of the Java Ridge, and a group of Australian surf tourists are anchored beside an idyllic reef. A few kilometres away, Roya and her mother are amongst the passengers fleeing persecution aboard the Talakar. When a storm breaks, these stories collide with chilling consequences....
In the long, hot summer of 1989, Ben and Fab are best friends. Growing up in a small country town, they spend their days playing cricket, yabbying in local dams, wanting a pair of Nike Air Maxes and not talking about how Fab's dad hits him or how the sudden death of Ben's next-door neighbour unsettled him. Almost teenagers, they already know some things are better left unsaid. Then a newcomer arrives in the Wimmera. Fab reckons he is a secret agent, and he and Ben stake him out.
Five women reluctantly leave the city for a challenging hike across the rugged Giralang Ranges as part of a corporate retreat. Only four come out the other side. Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk has a particularly keen interest in the whereabouts of the missing bushwalker. Alice Russell is the whistleblower in his latest case - and Alice knew secrets.
A story of desperation, resolution and small-town prejudice played out against the blistering extremes of life on the land. Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, a farmer turns his gun on his family and then himself. As questions mount and suspicion casts a long shadow over the parched town, specialist investigator Aaron Falk is forced to confront the community that rejected him 20 years earlier.
Winner of the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award. He hated the word retirement, but not as much as he hated the word village, as if ageing made you a peasant or a fool. Herein lives the village idiot. Professor Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, world expert on concrete and connoisseur of modernist design, has quarantined himself from life by moving to a retirement village.
Jaxie dreads going home. His mum’s dead. The old man bashes him without mercy, and he wishes he was an orphan. And then, in one terrible moment, his life is stripped to little more than what he can carry and how he can keep himself alive. There’s just one person left in the world who understands him and what he still dares to hope for. But to reach her he’ll have to cross the vast saltlands on a trek that only a dreamer or a fugitive would attempt.
'Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.' First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn't know anything about that at 19. At 19, he's proud of the fact his relationship flies in the face of social convention. As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen.
Having signed up for the US Army in the 1850s, aged barely 17, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, go on to fight in the Indian wars and ultimately the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, despite the horrors they both see and are complicit in, they find these days to be vivid. Both an intensely poignant story of two men and the lives they are dealt and a fresh look at some of the most fateful years in America's past.
Abandoned by her mother as a toddler, only occasionally visited by her volatile father and raised solely by her tormented Pop, Justine finds sanctuary in The Choke, a place where the banks of the Murray River are so narrow they can almost touch. Although Justine doesn't know it, her father is a menacing criminal, and the world she is exposed to is one of great peril to her. She must make sense of it on her own - and when she eventually does, she knows what she has to do....
Deaf since early childhood, Caleb Zelic is used to meeting life head-on. But now his best mate is dead, his ex-wife, Kat, is avoiding him and nightmares haunt him. But when a young woman is killed, after pleading for his help in sign language, Caleb is determined to find out who she was. And when the trail leads him back to his hometown, he uncovers secrets that could threaten any chance of reuniting with Kat and his life.
Inspired by a true story. In 1825, in a remote Irish valley lying between the mountains and Flesk River of Killarney, three women are brought together by strange and troubling events. Nora Leahy, a widow, has lost her daughter and her husband in the same year and is now burdened with the care of her grandson, Michael. The boy cannot walk or speak, and Nora has kept him hidden from neighbours, who might see in his deformity evidence of supernatural interference.
In 1855 Salt Creek lies at the far reaches of the remote, beautiful and inhospitable coastal region, the Coorong, in the new province of South Australia. The area, just opened to graziers willing to chance their luck, becomes home to Stanton Finch and his large family, including 15-year-old Hester Finch. Once wealthy political activists, the Finch family has fallen on hard times. Cut adrift from the polite society they were raised to be part of, Hester and her siblings make connections where they can.
It is 1964: Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening uninvited, where he notices a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman. When Bert kisses Beverly Keating, his host's wife, he sets in motion the joining of two families. In 1988, Franny Keating, now 24, meets one of her idols, the famous author Leon Posen. After telling him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story.
Isma is free. After years spent raising her twin siblings in the wake of their mother's death, she is finally studying in America, resuming a dream long deferred. But she can't stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London - or their brother, Parvaiz, who's disappeared in pursuit of his own dream: to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. Then Eamonn enters the sisters' lives. Handsome and privileged, he inhabits a London worlds away from theirs.
The story of one man who had the guts to lose his gut. This is an audiobook that will finally help an ordinary bloke lose weight. Ever struggled with your weight? Or did you stop struggling years ago and let the pies win? Peter FitzSimons has been there and eaten that. In The Great Aussie Bloke Slim-Down, he will lead you through the fads that failed him, the diets that died fast and left him furious, and the ways his waistline kept the belt industry in business.
When editor Susan Ryeland is given the tattered manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has little idea it will change her life. She's worked with the revered crime writer for years, and his detective, Atticus Pund, is renowned for solving crimes in the sleepy English villages of the 1950s. As Susan knows only too well, vintage crime sells handsomely. It's just a shame that it means dealing with an author like Alan Conway.... But Conway's latest tale of murder at Pye Hall is not quite what it seems.
In the familiar setting of Holt, Colorado, home to all of Kent Haruf's inimitable fiction, Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to a neighbor, Louis Waters. Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis's wife.
Darren has two big talents: cricket and trouble. It is no surprise, then, that he becomes an Australian sporting star of the bad-boy variety - one of those men who's always got away with things and just keeps going...until the day we meet him, middle aged and in the boot of a car, and everything pointing towards a shallow grave.
Gripping suspense from the Ned Kelly Award-winning author of Quota.
Prepared to give it a go after reading other reviews but third umpire still undecided. Can understand how an author can reach a point when they face a choice to end the story by wrapping up the loose ends even if there is a bit of a twist. Why didn’t they chose that way?
There’s a couple of characters that could have been developed a lot more - like the reporter.
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
I would recommend the first half of this book.Starts out well believable and engaging but the ending is so ridiculous and the tying up of loose ends dubiously explained as are the final actions of the main character. At the end of the book you feel like you've wasted your time. Serong sets a great scene but the story telling lets the reader down.
Was The Rules of Backyard Cricket worth the listening time?
No only the first half was good the narrator did a great job but the storyline falters.
Any additional comments?
Jock Serong should keep trying.I'll probably read another one but curb my expectations.
Rupert does a superb job narrating this book, and I hope some magnificent upcoming director picks up the rights for this and does it justice in film format.
Well done
True noir, aussie style, highly recommend this book if you like grit. Incredibly suspenseful and moving. The narration is brilliant thought it was Richard Roxburgh.