Showing results by author "Robert Hillman" in All Categories

'I’m a Wathaurong man. I’m an artist who draws on life in this big red and yellow and black country.' Stan 'Yarra' Yarramunua: artist, musician, actor, social worker, businessman. From growing up in poverty in Swan Hill - and sometimes on the road, with his itinerant father - Yarra had a tumultuous and often rough childhood. He learnt early how to lift a wallet or two and grew into a ratbag who looked set to follow in his father’s footsteps: fall into one too many skirmishes with the law; have one too many drinks, sliding down the path to alcoholism.

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.

World War II is over, and Hiroshima lies in a heap of poisoned rubble when young Quaker Wesley Cunningham returns home to Almond Tree. He served as a stretcher-bearer; he’s seen his fair share of horror. Now he intends to build beautiful houses and to marry, having fallen in love with his neighbour’s daughter, Beth Hardy. Beth has other plans. An ardent socialist, she is convinced the Party and Stalin’s Soviet Union hold the answers to all the world’s evils. She doesn’t believe in marriage, and in any case, her devotion is to the cause. 

A remarkably warm-hearted, uplifting and inspiring story of one boy's survival against the odds. Abdi's world fell apart when he was only fifteen and Somalia's vicious civil war hit Mogadishu. Unable to find his family and effectively an orphan, he fled with some sixty others,heading to Kenya...

Tom Hope doesn’t think he’s much of a farmer, but he’s doing his best. He can’t have been much of a husband to Trudy, either, judging by her sudden departure. It’s only when she returns, pregnant to someone else, that he discovers his surprising talent as a father. So when Trudy finds Jesus and takes little Peter away with her to join the holy rollers, Tom’s heart breaks all over again. Enter Hannah Babel, quixotic small-town bookseller: the second Jew, and the most vivid person, Tom has ever met. He dares to believe they could make each other happy. 

A story of courage, unconventionality and lust for life. Vera Wasowski was just seven years old when German soldiers marched her family into the Lvov Jewish ghetto in Poland. She watched her father take his own life and her mother accede to sexual blackmail in order to ensure her and Vera’s survival. With unsparing honesty and the blackest humour, she recalls a world where the desire to survive was everything.

Can one unlikely bookshop heal two broken souls? "Beautifully written . . . Full of insight into the nature of tragedy, love, and redemption."--Garth Stein "A poignant journey of unthinkable loss, love, and the healing capacity of the written word."--Ellen Keith It is 1968 in rural Australia and...

Tom Hope doesn't chase rainbows. He does his best on the farm - he milks the cows, harvests the apples, looks after the sheep - but Tom's been lonely since Trudy left, taking little Peter with her to go join the holy rollers. Enter Hannah Babel, quixotic smalltown bookseller: the second Jew - and the most vivid person - Tom has ever met. When she asks him to help her build Australia's most beautiful bookshop, Tom dares to believe they could make each other happy. But it is 1968: 24 years since Hannah and her own little boy arrived at Auschwitz.

Welsey Cunningham grew up running barefoot through the orchards of his Quaker family farm, working with horses and dreaming of one day building himself a house on his own patch of ground above the river. The Second World War interrupted those dreams: it took Wes to New Guinea as a medic and then sent him home with healing bullet wounds in his legs. While Wes was away, life in Almond Tree continued but everyone's been changed by the war.