Showing results by narrator "Humphrey Bower" in All Categories

Arthur and Waldo Brown are twins and destined never to grow apart. They share everything, except their views of things. This is the story of two people living one life. Arthur and Waldo Brown were born twins and destined never to to grow away from each other. They spent their childhood together. Their youth together. Middle age together. Retirement together. They even shared the same girl. They shared everything - except their view of things. Waldo, with his intelligence, saw everything and understood little. Arthur was the fool who didn't bother to look. He understood.

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....

Considered one of the all-time great American works of fiction, Fitzgerald’s glorious yet ultimately tragic social satire on the Jazz Age encapsulates the exuberance, energy and decadence of an era. After the Great War, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, pursues wealth, riches and the lady he lost to another man with stoic determination. He buys a mansion across from her house and throws lavish parties to entice her. When Gatsby finally does reunite with Daisy Buchanan, tragic events are set in motion.

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.

After a one-night stand with an attractive stranger, pole-dancer Gina Davies finds herself prime suspect in an attempted terrorist attack on Sydney. Hunted by the police, her face stares back at her on the unremitting 24/7 news cycle. She is soon running away from her dreams for a better life and witnessing every truth turn into a betrayal.

For all the wrong reasons, our hero, Mollel, is assigned to the investigation of the brutal murder of a local prostitute. Was it a female circumcision operation gone wrong? Or was she the victim of a pimp or one of her customers? Mollel, who cannot leave the truth alone, whatever the consequences, soon begins to uncover something far more far-reaching. But are the warrior's instincts that have always served him so well correct? Or will all his convictions about the case be turned on their head?

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.

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.

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.

In 2012 retired South African general Johan Jooste was parachuted into the seemingly unwinnable war against rhino poaching in the Kruger National Park. With poaching spiralling out of control, Jooste was given the mandate to 'go military', to convert Kruger's ranger corps into a para-military force capable of taking the fight to poachers. Aged 60, white, and a veteran of 35 years of military service, Jooste's controversial appointment was immediately met with resentment and hostility by elements of South African National Parks, the police, and even the military he had served with.

In a far-off desert world remarkably similar to outback Australia, evolution has taken an unexpected turn. The dominant life form is a creature covered in fur but with living steel panels beneath. It gnaws on bones and sniffs lamp posts but fills up on oil, brake fluid and petrol. And it's wonderfully clever with its wheels and wing mirrors – able to do just about anything, in fact – which is lucky since it hasn't got any arms or legs.

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.

On the far northwest coast of Tasmania at Cape Grimm lies the isolated and idiosyncratic community of Skye, which practises a religion that reveres the imagination. One clear evening in 1992 all the inhabitants enter the church hall, where they are locked in and burned alive. They have been persuaded to do this by a young man called Caleb Mean - also known as El Nino, the Christ Child.

It must have been someone's idea of a joke. Too many offended egos back at headquarters, too many influential people unhappy with him in Nairobi. And yet, with his record, almost impossible to dismiss. So where had they sent Mollel? Straight to Hell. When Mollel, a former Maasai warrior turned detective, ends up in a small, fly-blown town on the edge of a national park, it looks as if his career has taken a nose-dive. His colleagues are a close-knit group and they have not taken kindly to a stranger in their midst. M

War,’ says the Mayor, ‘at last.’ Three armies march on New Prentisstown, each one intent on destroying the others. Todd and Viola are caught in the middle, with no chance of escape. As the battles commence, how can they hope to stop the fighting? How can there ever be peace when they’re so hopelessly outnumbered? And if war makes monsters of men, what terrible choices await? But then a third voice breaks into the battle, one bent on revenge….

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.

Tourmaline is an isolated Western Australian mining town - a place of heat and dust, as allegorical as it is real. Out of the desert staggers a young diviner, Michael Random, offering salvation to this parched town. The once comatose community is indeed stirred to life, by hate as much as by love, and its people find salvation in neither water nor gold.

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.

Cuteness is an area where culture and biology get tangled up. Seeing a cute animal triggers some of the most powerful psychological instincts we have – the ones that elicit our care and protection – but there is a deeper story behind the broad appeal of Japanese cats and saccharine greetings cards. Joshua Paul Dale, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of cuteness studies, explains how the cute aesthetic spread around the globe, from pop brands to Lolita fashion, kids' cartoons and the unstoppable rise of Hello Kitty.

In this explosive Chaos Walking short story, discover what happened during Viola’s terrifying voyage to the New World. Best listened to immediately after The Knife of Never Letting Go, find out exactly what happened before Viola and Todd’s first meeting and get exciting hints of things still to come in the award-winning and best-selling trilogy.