Showing results by narrator "Humphrey Bower" in All Categories

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.

Widely regarded as a classic in Australian literature, Richard Flanagan's debut novel takes us on a swirling journey into Tasmania's past and our river guide's own violent ancestral secrets. Beneath a waterfall on the Franklin, Aljaz Cosini, river guide, lies drowning. Beset by visions at once horrible and fabulous, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears.

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.

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.

An extraordinary story about a couple’s experience of moving into the remote Australian wilderness. Stan Parker, with only a horse and a dog for company, journeys to a remote patch of land he has inherited in the Australian hills. Once the land is cleared and a rudimentary house built, he brings his wife, Amy, to the wilderness. Together they face lives of joy and sorrow as they struggle against the environment.

Hurtle Duffield, a painter, is incapable of loving anything except what he paints. The men and women who court him during his long life are, above all, the victims of his art. He is the vivisector, dissecting their weaknesses with cruel precision: his sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion and the passionate illusions of his mistress, Hero Pavloussi.

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.

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?

Measuring the World recreates the parallel but contrasting lives of two geniuses of the German Enlightenment - the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss. Daniel Kehlmann has produced a novel of rare charm and readability, distinguished by its sly humor and unforgettable characterization

They were never an obvious group of friends. Julian came from the most staid of county families. Jake's passage from unassuming suburbia to the dreaming spires of Oxford happened only by chance, and at great cost. And Adrienne, daughter of one of New York's wealthiest and most glamorous families, grew up more used to appearances in Vogue than to Oxford's cold and dusty lecture halls. When the three of them arrive at university, it is Julian's sister, Maggie, who brings them together.

A president has been overthrown by a military coup in a nameless country in an unspecified era. The president's barber, chef, and portraitist are imprisoned, with many others, in a remote palace in the hills high above the city center. Before the coup, these three men worked with unquestioning loyalty, serving the president in seemingly benign jobs. Now, forced to serve the country's new leader, they begin to reconsider their role in the old regime.

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.

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 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.

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.

Thomas Keneally pulls no punches in this powerful novel about the Catholic Church's attempts to cover up cases of child abuse. Expelled from the archdiocese of Sydney as a young priest for his outspoken views on the Vietnam War, Father Frank Docherty returns to Australia in 1996 to speak at a conference on paedophilia within the Catholic Church. There, he finds himself caught up in the cases of two people who claim to have been sexually abused by an eminent Sydney cleric.

I want to die. I do not want to be mad.... It is like my body is a house, and some visitor has come and attacked the person who lived there. After an Australian patrol officer commits suicide on a remote New Guinea island in 1959, five witnesses are called to a government inquiry. Each has a disturbing story to tell: strand by strand, the mystery of the officer's past is unravelled. But what of other visitants, like the unidentified flying object and the cargo cult it has inspired on the island?

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

In a world where eight billion souls have perished, the survivors huddle together apart, perpetually at war, in the city-states of Rise and Shine. Yet this war, far from representing their doom, is their means of survival. For their leaders have found the key to life when crops, livestock and the very future have been blighted - a key that turns on each citizen being moved by human suffering. Yet is this small hope, this compassion, enough to sustain them against the despair born of all the friends they’ve lost, all the experience they’ll never know?

Laid low by a tropical disease and an accompanying malaise, Crispin Clare returns to his ancestral home in East Anglia. Local folklore seeps into his fever dreams and into his writing, and the lines between reality and myth soon start to blur. In this finely woven tale of illness and recovery, family and fable, Randolph Stow creates a unique, imaginative landscape, populated by figures from old English myths and legends, and from Clare’s present.