Showing results by narrator "Humphrey Bower" in All Categories

killer is hounding the seaside town of Old Tornwich. Residents are gripped by fear and suspicion, and the finger of blame is pointed in all directions. But the bodies keep falling, and the crimes remain unsolved, the culprit at large. No mere whodunit, The Suburbs of Hell - its story inspired by a real-life serial killer - is a profoundly disturbing psychological drama with a devastating conclusion, the final work of one of Australia's greatest writers.

Excommunicated to Canada due to his radical preaching on the Vietnam War and other human rights causes, Father Frank Docherty is now a psychologist and monk. He returns to Australia to speak on abuse in the church and unwittingly is soon listening to stories from two different people - a young man via his suicide note and an ex-nun - who both claim to have been sexually abused by an eminent Sydney cardinal.

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.

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?

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.

In 1980, Tom Keneally walked into a store in Beverly Hills owned by Polish Jew Leopold Pfefferberg Page to buy a new briefcase. For the next few years, Tom's life was taken over by this charismatic and driven man, known as Poldek, and the story he wanted shared.

It was 80 years ago, on the publication of The House at Pooh Corner, when Christopher Robin said good-bye to Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood. Now they are all back in new adventures, for the first time approved by the Trustees of the Pooh Properties. This is a companion volume that truly captures the style of A. A. Milne - a worthy sequel to The House at Pooh Corner and Winnie-the-Pooh.

Snowscape: set shortly after the events of Monsters of Men, this gripping story tells of a scout ship that discovers a monstrous creature lurking in the arctic wastes of the New World’s final frontier. As the crew, including two much loved characters from the trilogy, face up to the monster, sensational new truths about Todd and Viola’s world are revealed.

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.

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.

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.

The year is 1977 and Adrian is nine. He lives with his Gran and his uncle Rory; his best friend is Clinton Tull. He loves to draw and he wants a dog; he's afraid of quicksand, shopping centres, and self-combustion. Adrian watches his suburban world, but there is much he cannot understand. He does not for instance, know why three neighborhood children might set out to buy ice-cream and never come back home.

Through the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu, Miss Hare wanders, half mad. In the wilderness she stumbles upon an Aboriginal artist and a Jewish refugee. They place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. In a world of pervasive evil, all four have been independently damaged and discarded. Now in one shared vision they find themselves bound together, understanding the possibility of redemption.

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.

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.

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.

From the best-selling author of What the Birds See comes a brilliantly told suspense novel. As life slips away, Gabriel looks back over his brief 20 years that have been clouded by frustration and humiliation. A small town and distant parents ensure that he is never allowed to forget the horrific mistake he made as a child. He has only two friends, his dog Surrender, and the unruly wild boy Finnigan, with whom he made a boyhood pact.

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.

For more than a century Major Thomas has been a footnote in diverging historical arguments. A proper hearing is long overdue. Opinion is still sharply divided on whether Breaker Morant and his Australian co-defendants were criminals who got what they deserved or scapegoats used by the British Empire. Major Thomas, the bush lawyer drafted in at the last minute to defend them, is invariably depicted as either a hero or an incompetent fool. Now, for the first time, Greg Growden attempts to unravel the truth about the lawyer and soldier who returned from South Africa a broken man.

Gerard Moyne is a Sydney-based art consultant with a passion for the genius of Turner. He has a particular way of looking at things - discerning, sometimes a little callous, always out of the ordinary. When he meets Julia he falls blindly in love with her, unable to see her as she is.