Showing results by narrator "Humphrey Bower" in All Categories

When Adam moves into the abandoned house on the dusty edge of town, he is hoping to recover from the loss of his job and his home in the city. But when he meets Canning – a shadowy figure from his childhood – and Canning's enigmatic and beautiful wife, a sinister new chapter in his life begins. Canning has inherited a vast fortune and a giant folly in the veld, a magical place of fantasy and dreams that seduces Adam and transforms him absolutely, violently – and perhaps forever....

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.

A finely tuned comic depiction of Melbourne's ethnically diverse northern suburbs and the dark underbelly of city life. Down on his luck and hard up for cash, Carl works in the kitchen of a seedy rock 'n' roll joint in ethnically diverse Brunswick. The bouncers and bosses terrify him, he's desperately in love with a much younger Greek waitress, and to make matters worse his mother has come to stay with him. Then a dead body turns up. He and his best mate, Dave, will have to do something about it, and fast....

When Celia Inverarity, aged 17, is found brutally murdered in a secluded West Auckland park one Sunday afternoon, Paul Prior, her English teacher and mentor, is suspected of being her murderer. Celia's death and the violence which follows send Prior back to examine the past - a past that is as secret as his father's den in the old poison shed. Eventually the murderer is exposed, but not before a family has been split apart and old wounds revealed.

A blood smear trailing along a footpath of a suburban Sydney street went largely ignored by local residents accustomed to hoaxes and bloody turf brawls in their beachside suburb. Initially police suspected it was nothing more than animal blood. But at the end of the trail, at the base of a Maroubra cliff, lay the naked body of notorious underworld figure Tony Hines, shot four times at close range. Hines was a man with a history of violence, a rape conviction and a long list of enemies.

Bad Ground is the real story of Australian miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb and their deliverance from entombment in the depths of the Beaconsfield hard-rock mine.

Jack Willis seems like any ordinary outback trucker - but in secret he's a romance novelist. And he's about to become very successful. But real men don't write romance novels, and so Jack's been writing under the name of his friend, Ruby Vale. The only problem is, Ruby doesn't know. When glamorous publisher Ziggy Keane arrives to do business with 'Ruby Vale', Jack must do some fancy footwork in order to keep his writing career afloat. Jack hatches a scheme, but will he be able to get Ruby to go along with it?

When foreign correspondent Tony Maniaty goes back to Timor for the first time since he fled for his life 30 years before, he discovers a land of ghosts - some he left behind, and some he's brought with him. He's there to watch five young actors play out the last days of five friends of his - men who were murdered by the Indonesian army in one of the most infamous incidents (and cover-ups) in Australian foreign affairs.

Was Bjorn of Bromme one of the greatest explorers of the Viking Age or just a simple-minded, lice-infested Barbarian with a passion for beach volleyball? Could Soong Mei Ying really have discovered every Asiatic Dragon known to Serpentology, or was she just a thirteenth-century teenager who wanted to travel and meet people? Did Dr E.F. Liebermann perish after discovering the Common Green Draak, also known as the ‘Awful Gurgler’, or was he suffering from a severe bout of jungle madness?

The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea allows us a precious glimpse into a simpler kind of childhood in a country that no longer exists. In 1941, Rob Coram is six. The war feels far removed from his world of aunties and cousins and the beautiful, dry landscape of Geraldton in Western Australia. But when his older favourite cousin, Rick, leaves to join the army, the war takes a step closer. When Rick returns from the war several years later, he has changed, and Rob feels betrayed.

A kid finds a lost "thing" on the beach where he's scavenging for his bottle top collection. The thing is a large, freakish creature but no one else really notices it, it's simply not a part of their familiar day-to-day reality. So the kid takes it upon himself to try to find where the lost thing belongs.

How many diets have you tried that haven't worked for you? The Total Wellbeing Diet, developed by Australia's CSIRO, is not just another diet; it's a long-term healthy eating plan that can make you feel great. This special audio edition offers an introduction and understanding of the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet, as well as a section on maintaining your new low weight and healthy lifestyle.

Listeners young and old will delight in this second collection from award-winning multi-million copy bestselling Australian author Graeme Base....

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 Afghan refugee’s extraordinary journey - from his early life as a shepherd boy in the mountains of Northern Afghanistan, to his forced exile after being captured and tortured by the Taliban, to incarceration in an Australian detention centre...and finally, to freedom. This moving and poignant work gives the listener a rare insight into the contented ‘milk and honey’ life of a simple Afghan family before the civil war ripped their country apart. The lives and centuries-old livelihood of farmers, craftsmen and small business owners were destroyed in just weeks and months.

The body of a 17-year-old girl has been found covered in wildflowers on a hillside in the Drakensberg Mountains, near Durban. She is the daughter of a Zulu chief, destined to fetch a high bride price. Was Amahle as innocent as her family claims, or is her murder a sign that she lived a secret life? Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper is sent to investigate. He must enter the guarded worlds of a traditional Zulu clan and a white farming community to gather up the clues Amahle left behind and bring her murderer to justice.

Behind the uneasy trees rose the hills, and beyond them again the country of the lost, huge wilderness between this last haunt of civilisation and the unpeopled sea. Exhausted and losing faith, an Anglican minister flees his mission in Australia's northwest for the vast emptiness of the outback. In the soul country of the desert, the old man searches for the islands of the Aboriginal dead, reflecting on past transgressions and on his life's work.

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.

Isaac, a young Australian photographer, is travelling through Europe. His whole life he has longed for the sophistication and wealth of the Europe of his father’s stories, the Europe at the centre of civilisation and culture. But behind the facade of a unified and globalised contemporary society, he finds a history blasted wasteland, a place forever condemned by the ghosts of its unspeakable past. Dead Europe is an unsettling ghost story about blood lust, blood libel, and blood revenge.

A woman washes ashore in Sicily. She has come from North Africa to find her son, taken from her when he was just days old by his father and stolen away to Berlin. With nothing but her maid’s uniform and a knife stashed in a plastic bag, she relies on strangers – some generous, some exploiting – to guide her passage north. These strangers tell of their encounters with a quiet, mysterious woman in a blue coat – each account a different view of the truth, a different truth.