Showing results for "the centre" in Historical Fiction

On a remote cattle station in Far North Queensland, four gold prospectors push their luck and pay the price. Venturing too close to the homestead they attract the attention of the landholders, who arrive armed and dangerous. Only three of the prospectors make it out alive. This is the story of Bruce Schuler’s murder at Palmerville Station on the 9th of July, 2012. His murderers, Stephen Struber and his wife Dianne Wilson, had for decades been a law unto themselves, terrorising all who dared cross ‘their’ land.

Alternating between nineteenth-century Europe and present-day New England, this tale follows the great British painter J. M. W. Turner - and his scene of artists, intellectuals, and lovers - and Henry, a middle-aged family man whose otherwise mundane existence is disrupted by the discovery of The Center of the World, Turner’s controversial painting of Helen of Troy that had been thought lost forever.

Set in the Five Points neighborhood of New York City, in the years 1857-1863, when America's attitudes toward people of color and slavery shifted—painfully, transformationally—to the point where a war that began to restore the union becomes one that owes much to Black fighting regiments, and common cause grows for the abolition of slavery. We experience the daily life of Five Points through the eyes of Theo, aged seven at the start of the book and 13 at its close. Theo is half Black and half Irish, an orphan living between the homes of her Black and Irish grandparents.