Tom Keneally

"Whilst living in exile on St Helena, Napoleon exerted an extraordinary influence on young Betsy Balcombe. How did she get from Napoleon's side to the Australian bush? When Tom Keneally discovered by chance at the National Gallery of Victoria that Betsy Balcombe, a young girl living on St Helena while the Emperor Napoleon was exiled there, had become the Emperor's intimate friend and annoyer', and had then emigrated with her family to Australia, he was impelled to begin another extraordinary novel, exploring the intersection between the ordinary people of the world and those we deem exceptional. Betsy Balcombe moved as a child with her family to St Helena, that high mid-Atlantic rock of exile'. Ten years later her family befriended, served and were ruined by their relationship with Napoleon. To redeem their fortunes William Balcombe, Betsy's father, betrayed the Emperor and accepted a job as the colonial treasurer of New South Wales, taking his family with him. After enduring a profound tragedy on the voyage out, and never quite recovering from the results of his association with Napoleon, William's life deteriorated; however, his family struggled and survived in Aust

Napoleon's Last Island

The tenth child of Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, known as Plorn, had consistently proved unable 'to apply himself ' to school or life. So aged sixteen, he is sent, as his brother Alfred was before him, to Australia. Plorn arrives in Melbourne in late 1868 carrying a terrible secret. He has never read a word of his father's work. He is sent out to a 2000-square-mile station in remotest New South Wales to learn to become a man, and a gentleman stockman, from the most diverse and toughest of companions. In the outback he becomes enmeshed with Paakantji, colonists, colonial-born, ex-convicts, ex-soldiers, and very few women. Plorn, unexpectedly, encounters the same veneration of his father and familiarity with Dickens' work in Australia as was rampant in England. Against this backdrop, and featuring cricket tournaments, horse-racing, bushrangers, sheep droving, shifty stock and station agents, frontier wars and first encounters with Australian women, Plorn meets extraordinary people and enjoys wonderful adventures as he works to prove himself. This is Tom Keneally in his most familiar terrain. Taking historical figures and events and reimagining them with verve, compassion and humour. It is a triumph.

Dickens Boy, The

Judy Nunn

Richard Flanagan

Peter FitzSimons

Nicole Alexander

Caroline Overington

Paul Ham

Susan Duncan

Mike Carlton

This fine collection of great Australian writers’ includes pieces from Judy Nunn, Tom Keneally, Paul Ham, Peter FitzSimons, Mike Carlton, Richard Flanagan, Nicole Alexander, Susan Duncan and Caroline Overington. Featuring extracts from Elianne by Judy Nunn, Shame and the Captives by Tom Keneally, 1914 by Paul Ham, Ned Kelly by Peter FitzSimons, First Victory by Mike Carlton, The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, Sunset Ridge by Nicole Alexander, Gone Fishing by Susan Duncan, and No Place Like Home by Caroline Overington – The Great Australian Writers' Collection 2013 is the perfect opportunity for readers to discover great new books from great Australian authors, or to get a taste for authors they might have heard about or read a great review about, but have been unsure if they’ll like their work. And the best part of all – it’s FREE! So start reading and sharing your new discoveries today.

The Great Australian Writers' Collection 2013

A memoir of Tom’s journey around the world to discover the complete story of Oskar Schindler and that list. In 1980 Tom Keneally was in Beverley Hills returning from the Sorrento film festival where The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith had been showing. Looking for a new briefcase, Tom meets the Polish-Jewish Leopold Pfefferberg Page aka Poldek and his life for the next few years is taken over by this charismatic and driven man and the story he wants shared. "It's a story for you, I swear," he says to Tom. The story is of course that of 'The all-drinking, all-screwing, all black-marketeering Nazi. But to me he was Jesus Christ, Oskar Schindler". And Poldek shared with Tom the story of Schindler's Ark which went on to win the Booker Prize and ultimately to become the Oscar award-winning film Schindler's List. Schindler, the ruined Catholic hedonist, had something ambiguous about him that appealled to the ex-seminarian Tom Keneally who still struggled with his own Catholicism and his humanist view of the world. Oskar showed that virtue, regardless of race, creed or religion, emerged where it would. Tom was a small child during WWII and these memories, along with the appeal of Schindler and Poldek's insistence, influenced him to write the book Schindler's Ark . Oskar and his Jews reduced the Holocaust - an almost untellable story in its scope and devastation - to an understandable human scale. Searching For Schindler is very much Tom's journey, he reflects on his early days as a writer with quite a bit of success - but no confidence - and how this book, the people he met, and the film it became, changed his life. From his Sydney home, he tracked down the main player's in Poldek and Schindler's story. Tom and Poldek travelled across the US, Germany, Israel, Austria and Poland interviewing survivors and discovering extraordinary stories. Schindler's Ark took a huge toll on Tom, and his family, he had never been so overwhelmed by the writing of a story. It forced him to think about Australians and their attitudes to the Holocaust, to think about the Israel / Palestine situation and about families. Not ready to give up the story of Schindler and his Jews after the enormous success of the book, Tom is there for the film adaptation and on set for the filming. Filled with stories of Steven Spielberg, Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes and many other well-known and strong characters Searching For Schindler gives Tom Keneally scope to show the wonderful, warm, thinking, compassionate and very funny man that he is.

Searching For Schindler

Learned Man is the child of the extraordinary cognitive leap that created humankind, as we know it, thought to have sprung from the Rift Valley in Africa and soon after travelling to ancient Australia. Shelby, the acclaimed documentary-maker, like Learned Man influenced by Heroes, thinks embattled Eritrean society holds promise that it might represent the new cognitive leap, the one that will reconcile our tenderness and our savagery, our reason and our emotions so that we are no longer a dichotomy between the two, so that we are no longer both poets and killers, but a clear-headed and less dichotomised being. Both the old men of the novel have a lens between themselves and reality. Learned Man sees the world through the lens of his responsibility under law. Shelby sees the world through the lens of his camera. Both men are well aware that their landscape comes to them from elders and hero ancestors. Learned speaks to the heroes in dream-trances, Shelby through his camera. The way the hero ancestors speak to and make demands of Learned, heroes and elders speak to Shelby. Both men, Learned and Shelby, are willing to die and, in a sense, kill for their secret crafts. Learned kills a man to save the women and future of his tribe; similarly Shelby's fellow cameraman is a sacrifice to the stories his camera must share, in this instance action in the Vietnam War.

Two Old Men Dying

A brilliant recreation of the first four years of white settlement in Australia by Booker Prize-winning author Tom Keneally. In 1787, Britain banished its unwanted citizens - uneducated petty thieves, streetwalkers, orphan chimneysweeps and dashing highwaymen - to the fringes of the known world. So remote was Botany Bay - the destination to which the overcrowded, disease-ridden convict ships were bound - that only one European expedition had ever before anchored there. Yet the rejects of Britain, accompanied only by a flimsy complement of soldiers, marines and officers, were expected to start a settlement and flourish. It was an audacious social experiment, unparalleled before or since. To the indigenous inhabitants, the white men came as ghosts through cracks in the cosmos, rudely seizing the bounty of land and sea. On the swampy shores of Botany Bay, and by the sandstone coves of Sydney Harbour, the clash of civilisations was ineviteable, intense and often tragic. From this improbable beginning, through famine, drought, escapes and floggings, the glory of modern Sydney was born. Britain's penal experiment succeeded against all odds. Impeccably researched and told in the inimitable Keneally style, The Commonwealth of Thieves is the compelling tale of a nation's beginning, its unforgettable people and their quest for identity.

The Commonwealth Of Thieves

Fanatic Heart

Meg Keneally

Unmourned

Margaret  Keneally

"A fast-paced, witty and gripping historical crime series from Tom Keneally and his eldest daughter Meg. In the Port Macquarie penal settlement for second offenders, at the edge of the known world, gentleman convict Hugh Monsarrat hungers for freedom. Originally transported for forging documents passing himself off as a lawyer, he is now the trusted clerk of the settlement's commandant. His position has certain advantages, such as being able to spend time in the Government House kitchen, being supplied with outstanding cups of tea by housekeeper Hannah Mulrooney, who, despite being illiterate, is his most intelligent companion. Not long after the commandant heads off in search of a rumoured river, his beautiful wife, Honora, falls ill with a sickness the doctor is unable to identify. When Honora dies, it becomes clear she has been slowly poisoned. Monsarrat and Mrs Mulrooney suspect the commandant's second-in-command, Captain Diamond, a cruel man who shares history with Honora. Then Diamond has Mrs Mulrooney arrested for the murder. Knowing his friend will hang if she is tried, Monsarrat knows he must find the real killer. And so begins The Monsarrat Series, a fast-paced

Soldier's Curse, The

Power Game

The tenth child of Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, known as Plorn, had consistently proved unable ‘to apply himself ’ to school or life. So aged sixteen, he is sent, as his brother Alfred was before him, to Australia. Plorn arrives in Melbourne in late 1868 carrying a terrible secret. He has never read a word of his father’s work. He is sent out to a 2000-square-mile station in remotest New South Wales to learn to become a man, and a gentleman stockman, from the most diverse and toughest of companions. In the outback he becomes enmeshed with Paakantji, colonists, colonial-born, ex-convicts, ex-soldiers, and very few women. Plorn, unexpectedly, encounters the same veneration of his father and familiarity with Dickens’ work in Australia as was rampant in England. Against this backdrop, and featuring cricket tournaments, horse-racing, bushrangers, sheep droving, shifty stock and station agents, frontier wars and first encounters with Australian women, Plorn meets extraordinary people and enjoys wonderful adventures as he works to prove himself. This is Tom Keneally in his most familiar terrain. Taking historical figures and events and reimagining them with verve, compassion and humour. It is a triumph.

The Dickens Boy

Henry Hallward, editor of the Sydney Chronicle, is a thorn in the side of the colonial administration with his agitations for greater rights for convicts and his criticism of the governor. He’s been imprisoned several times for criminal libel, and during one detention, he is shot dead. Monsarrat and Mrs Mulrooney are sent to investigate, but after Monsarrat meets with Colonel Duchamp, Governor Darling’s right-hand man, it becomes clear they are on their own in solving this murder. As the duo meets other characters whose lives have touched that of brave Hallward, they realise the scope of their enquiries must be broad. There is Gerald Mobbs, editor of the Chronicle’s rival newspaper, the Colonial Flyer, which some call a mouthpiece of the administration. There is Duchamp’s sister, Henrietta, who seems to want to befriend Mrs Mulrooney, but also to have ulterior motives. There is Albert Bancroft, an éminence grise who may, or may not, own the house opposite the gaol, from where the murderous shot was fired. The undaunted pair must sift through these suspects, aware that at any moment Duchamp could ignominiously dismiss them, leaving Hallward’s murder unsolved and the freedom of the colony’s press in grave jeopardy.

Book 4, The Monsarrat Series

The Ink Stain

Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, a haunting and evocative tale of murder and loss of innocence in wartime Australia. Sydney, 1942 – the year of the fall of Singapore, the bombing of Darwin and the surprise attack on Sydney Harbour by Japanese midget submarines. Australia is surely doomed to fall to the Japanese . . . Through the eyes of a naive young priest we see into the hearts of a people who fear the end of life as they know it. In the confessional, Father Frank Darragh hears how his community is changing – how the very real fear of invasion by the Japanese is leading people to challenge what the church teaches is right or wrong. Under the threat of death, people do things they would never dream of in peacetime. Especially vulnerable are those women whose husbands have been captured in Singapore or the Western desert. Facing the future alone and unprotected, they are at risk of succumbing to the charms of more subtle invaders, American servicemen. When the beautiful wife of an Australian POW is found brutally murdered, she takes on the character of a victim of war in the mind of the impressionable young priest. His obsession with her lost soul leads Darragh on a dangerous journey of personal discovery , one that puts his own life at risk . . .

An Angel In Australia

Rosie Scott

'I don't think I've seen a more impressive collection of Australian writers in a single book.' Stephen Romei, The Australian One of the central moral issues of our time is the question of asylum seekers, arguably the most controversial subject in Australia today. In this landmark anthology, twenty-seven of Australia's finest writers have focused their intelligence and creativity on the theme of the dispossessed, bringing a whole new perspective of depth and truthfulness to what has become a fraught, distorted war of words. This anthology confirms that the experience of seeking asylum – the journeys of escape from death, starvation, poverty or terror to an imagined paradise – is part of the Australian mindset and deeply embedded in our culture and personal histories. A Country Too Far is a tour de force of stunning fiction, memoir, poetry and essays. Edited by award-winning writers Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally, and featuring contributors including Anna Funder, Christos Tsiolkas, Elliot Perlman, Gail Jones, Raimond Gaita, Les Murray, Rodney Hall and Geraldine Brooks, this rich anthology is by turns thoughtful, fierce, evocative, lyrical and moving, and always extraordinarily powerful. A Country Too Far makes an indispensable contribution to the national debate.

A Country Too Far

Schindler's Ark - Ssb

When an affluent Kempsey matron spots a young Aboriginal boy who bears an uncanny resemblance to her husband, not only does she scream for divorce, attempt to take control of the child's future and upend her comfortable life, but the whole town seems drawn into chaos. A hero of the First World War has a fit at the cinema and is taken to a psychiatric ward in Sydney, his Irish farmhand is murdered, and a gay piano-playing veteran, quietly a friend to many in town, is implicated. Corporal Hitler's Pistol speaks to the never-ending war that began with 'the war to end all wars'. Rural communities have always been a melting pot and many are happy to accept a diverse bunch ... as long as they don't overstep. Set in a town he knows very well, in this novel Tom Keneally tells a compelling story of the interactions and relationships between black and white Australians in early twentieth-century Australia.

Corporal Hitler’s Pistol

Learned Man is the child of humankind as we know it; of those who are thought to have travelled from the Rift Valley in Africa and to ancient Australia. Shelby Apple is an acclaimed documentary-maker. After making films about Learned Man's discovery, in Vietnam and back home in the Northern Territory, Shelby turns his sights on Eritrea. He thinks this embattled society might represent a new cognitive leap, one that will reconcile our tenderness and our savagery, our reason and our emotions. Shelby sees the world through the lens of his camera; Learned Man through the lens of his responsibility under law. Both men are well aware that their landscape comes to them from elders and ancestors. They are each willing to die and, in a sense, kill for their secret crafts. Two Old Men Dying is an exquisite exploration of community and country, love and mortality.

A gripping thriller and a chilling glimpse of an imaginary world that seems all too real. In an oil-rich country terrorised by a tyrant known as The Great Uncle, war veteran and celebrated writer Alan Sheriff has a better life than most until his beautiful and beloved actress wife Sarah dies - and he is made an offer he can't refuse. He must write a great novel in three months - or else. If the writer no longer cares about his own life, he has friends. What follows is a terrifying trial as he battles with his conscience, Sarah's memory, a good woman who wants to rescue him, a dark secret - and the most important deadline of his life Stark, terrifying and utterly compelling, The Tyrant's Novel is a gripping thriller and a chilling glimpse of an imaginary world that seems all too real.

Tom Keneally

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