Résultats lu par "Humphrey Bower" dans Toutes les catégories

Jack Willis seems like any ordinary outback trucker - but in secret he's a romance novelist. And he's about to become very successful. But real men don't write romance novels, and so Jack's been writing under the name of his friend, Ruby Vale. The only problem is, Ruby doesn't know. When glamorous publisher Ziggy Keane arrives to do business with 'Ruby Vale', Jack must do some fancy footwork in order to keep his writing career afloat. Jack hatches a scheme, but will he be able to get Ruby to go along with it?

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.

The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea allows us a precious glimpse into a simpler kind of childhood in a country that no longer exists. In 1941, Rob Coram is six. The war feels far removed from his world of aunties and cousins and the beautiful, dry landscape of Geraldton in Western Australia. But when his older favourite cousin, Rick, leaves to join the army, the war takes a step closer. When Rick returns from the war several years later, he has changed, and Rob feels betrayed.

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.

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.

When Celia Inverarity, aged 17, is found brutally murdered in a secluded West Auckland park one Sunday afternoon, Paul Prior, her English teacher and mentor, is suspected of being her murderer. Celia's death and the violence which follows send Prior back to examine the past - a past that is as secret as his father's den in the old poison shed. Eventually the murderer is exposed, but not before a family has been split apart and old wounds revealed.

From the author of the classic novel Wake in Fright comes a chillingly brilliant short novel that's part Wolf Creek and part Duel. Fear Is the Rider is a nail-biting chase into the outback, towards the devil lurking at its centre. It was quite silent in the scrub. No breeze stirred the leaves and no bird moved, except for the kite hawks wheeling silently, eternally, high in the hot air. She smelt her attacker before she saw him.

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.

Born in Shanghai and shipped to England as a child, Peter Whitehead then made his way to Australia, solo, at the age of 13 in 1938, in order to save his family money. Alone and working in near slave-like conditions as a farm labourer, Whitehead learned the art of breaking wild horses and so began a lifelong love affair with animals. After wartime service as a horse breaker for the army and a gunner on a Liberator bomber, Whitehead headed to Africa and had a richly varied career as an agricultural officer, national parks ranger, big game hunter, animal wrangler and rancher.

Jerra and his best mate Sean set off in a beaten-up old VW to go camping on the coast. Jerra's friends and family want to know when he will finish university, when he will find a girl. But they don't understand about Sean's mother, Jewel, or the bush or the fish with the pearl. They think he needs a job, but what Jerra is searching for is more elusive. Only the sea, and perhaps the old man who lives in a shack beside it, can help.

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?

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.

A finely tuned comic depiction of Melbourne's ethnically diverse northern suburbs and the dark underbelly of city life. Down on his luck and hard up for cash, Carl works in the kitchen of a seedy rock 'n' roll joint in ethnically diverse Brunswick. The bouncers and bosses terrify him, he's desperately in love with a much younger Greek waitress, and to make matters worse his mother has come to stay with him. Then a dead body turns up. He and his best mate, Dave, will have to do something about it, and fast....

In the Memorial Room is a brilliant black comedy by the celebrated author of An Angel at My Table. Harry Gill, a moderately successful writer of historical fiction, has been awarded the annual Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship - a 'living memorial' to the poet Margaret Rose Hurndell. He arrives in the small French village of Menton, where Hurndell once lived and worked, to write. But the Memorial Room is not suitable - it has no electricity or water. Hurndell never wrote here, though it is expected of Harry.

A woman washes ashore in Sicily. She has come from North Africa to find her son, taken from her when he was just days old by his father and stolen away to Berlin. With nothing but her maid’s uniform and a knife stashed in a plastic bag, she relies on strangers – some generous, some exploiting – to guide her passage north. These strangers tell of their encounters with a quiet, mysterious woman in a blue coat – each account a different view of the truth, a different truth.

Hamlet's father has just died. By the time they've filled in the grave, his mother has remarried. Hamlet suspects foul play, and it's troubling his spirit. Or maybe he was always troubled. Ophelia is in love with him. His best friend Horatio can't work him out. Then, on a cold, still night, Hamlet meets the ghost of his father.

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.

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?

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.

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.