Showing results by narrator "Humphrey Bower" in All Categories

Rossamund has always dreamed of a career in the Navy, fighting tentacled monsters and rescuing damsels from hook-handed pirates. But fate has chosen him for a different path. He is being sent to train as a Lamplighter – to bring light to the inland roads of the Half-Continent, to shine the way for travellers through lands peopled by outcasts, monsters and worse. But for Rossamund to begin his education, he must first undertake a journey of his own – to the great city of High Vesting.

Jessica is based on the inspiring true story of a young girl's fight for justice against tremendous odds. A tomboy, Jessica is the pride of her father, as they work together on the struggling family farm. One quiet day, the peace of the bush is devastated by a terrible murder. Only Jessica is able to save the killer from the lynch mob: but will justice prevail in the courts? Nine months later, a baby is born...with Jessica determined to guard the secret of the father's identity.

Peter Carey's first novel and first Miles Franklin winner, Bliss remains a work ahead of its time. It takes dying during a heart attack for Harry Joy to realise that the life he thought was happy is actually hellish. His wife is a cheat, his kids are a source of shame, his company spruiks carcinogens. While Harry is resuscitated, he will never be the same, for, having seen his own misery, he can no longer deny the injustice around him. But before he can be redeemed, a whole new perdition awaits him in this darkly funny and prescient fable about the idiocy of defiling nature.

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.

Towards the end of the Great Depression a young boy goes with his sister to stay at a farm while their mother is ill. There, during a scorching African summer, he witnesses a trial and punishment which will forever remind him of white men's cruelty to black people. The Night Country is a fable for all ages – a powerful account of the strength that lives within us all.

Thommo returns from Vietnam to an Australia that regards him as a mercenary guilty of war crimes. He begins to develop all kinds of physical and mental problems, and thinks it must only be him until he finds he is not alone. Ten mates, all who remain of his platoon who fought and died in the Battle of Long Tan, are affected the same way.

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.

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.

This is Bryce Courtenay's moving tribute to his son, Damon, a hemophiliac who died from medically acquired AIDS on April 1, 1991, at the age of 24. April Fool's Day is controversial, painful and heartbreaking, yet has a gentle humor. It is also life-affirming, and, above all, a testimony to the incredible regenerative strength of love: how when we confront our worst, we can become our best. This tragic yet uplifting story will change the way you think.

On a country property a man named Holland lives with his daughter Ellen. Over the years, as she grows into a beautiful young woman, he plants hundreds of different gum trees on his land. When Ellen is nineteen her father announces his decision: she will marry the man who can name all the species of eucalypt, down to the last tree. Suitors emerge from all corners, including the formidable, straight-backed Mr Cave, world expert on the varieties of eucalypt.

Sprocc, a young splingtwanger-player, leaves his home planet Blipp in search of musical freedom, pursued by the overly ambitious Musical Inquisitor. Lured by the promise of fame and fortune, Sprocc enters the annual Worst Band in the Universe Competition...

Joseph Leslie 'Squizzy' Taylor was many things to many people: a kind and caring husband, father and stepfather, a reliable son and brother, a generous and considerate neighbour and patron. He was also a criminal willing to consider any type of crime, provided it supported his lifestyle and his ego. Squizzy graduated from teenage pickpocket to adult murderer, from organizing smash-and-grab raids on jewellers to corrupting juries and suborning witnesses.

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.

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.

'The Wide, Wide Sea' is a Chaos Walking short story. Set before the Spackle War in a small fishing village by the sea, this is a heartbreaking tale of love and loyalty in a divided world. Best listened to immediately after The Ask and the Answer, it features familiar characters such as Mistress Coyle but gives a new perspective on the shocking events in the award-winning trilogy.

Each of us has a place to return to in our minds, a place of clarity and peace, a place to think, to create, to dream. For Bryce Courtenay this place was a waterhole in Africa where he used to escape to as a boy, in search of solitude. One evening, while lingering there, he witnessed the tallest of the great beasts drinking from the waterhole in the moonlight, and was spellbound. Ever since, he drew inspiration from this moment.

Big-hearted, moving and richly rewarding, That Deadman Dance is set in the first decades of the 19th century in the area around what is now Albany, Western Australia. In playful, musical prose, the book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers. The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting whales and establishing the fledgling colony.

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.

Spanning three generations‚ Capricornia tells the story of Australia's North. It is a story of whites and Aborigines and Asians‚ of chance relationships that can form bonds for life‚ of dispossession‚ murder and betrayal. In 1904 the brothers Oscar and Mark Shillingsworth‚ clad in serge suits and bowler hats‚ arrive in Port Zodiac on the coast of Capricornia. They are clerks who have come from the South to join the Capricornian Government Service.

Here are turnings of all kinds - changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours - where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives they have made for themselves. Beautifully crafted, and as tender as they are confronting, these elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people and celebrate the moments when the light shines through.