Showing results by narrator "Humphrey Bower" in All Categories

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.

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

In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. A stunning novel based on the extraordinary true story of German war profiteer and factory director Oskar Schindler, who came to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other single person during World War II.

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.

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.

It is summer and the Canadian Rockies are on fire. Fleeing the fallout of a relationship gone wrong, Alan West returns to the small town in the valley where he grew up. There, his grandfather, Cecil, suffers a heart attack and gives him one last task: he must track down the father he's never known, so that Cecil can make his peace. And so Alan begins his search for the elusive Jack West, a man who skipped town decades earlier and of whom Cecil has always refused to speak.

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.

The year is 1977 and Adrian is nine. He lives with his Gran and his uncle Rory; his best friend is Clinton Tull. He loves to draw and he wants a dog; he's afraid of quicksand, shopping centres, and self-combustion. Adrian watches his suburban world, but there is much he cannot understand. He does not for instance, know why three neighborhood children might set out to buy ice-cream and never come back home.

Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a naïve young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

A remote town. A girl of rare and exquisite beauty. A murder that silences a whole community. The body of a seventeen-year-old girl has been found covered in wildflowers on a hillside in the Drakensberg Mountains, near Durban. She is the daughter of a Zulu chief, destined to fetch a high bride price. Was Amahle as innocent as her family claims, or is her murder a sign that she lived a secret life? Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper is sent to investigate.

A sleek high-speed train glides silently through the French countryside, bearing Michael, an Australian writer, and his travelling world of memory and speculation. Melbourne, 1946, calls to him: the pressure cooker of the city during World War II has produced a small creative miracle, and at this pivotal moment the lives of his newly married parents, a group of restless artists, a proud old woman with a tent for a home, a journalist, a gallery owner, a farmer and a factory developer irrevocably intersect.

Bad Ground is the real story of Australian miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb and their deliverance from entombment in the depths of the Beaconsfield hard-rock mine.

When journalist Kevin Burns gets a call from former schoolmate Carl Greene, he's surprised. They weren't that close at school and the temperature cooled even more when Carl married Kevin's girl, Lucy. Carl, a scientist, sounds anxious and afraid. They arrange to meet at a baseball game in Denver but Carl never makes it. Someone kills him first. Soon after, Lucy surprises a masked figure prowling Carl's study. Whatever her husband was working on, a lot of people want to get their hands on it.

A blood smear trailing along a footpath of a suburban Sydney street went largely ignored by local residents accustomed to hoaxes and bloody turf brawls in their beachside suburb. Initially police suspected it was nothing more than animal blood. But at the end of the trail, at the base of a Maroubra cliff, lay the naked body of notorious underworld figure Tony Hines, shot four times at close range. Hines was a man with a history of violence, a rape conviction and a long list of enemies.

Gerard Moyne is a Sydney-based art consultant with a passion for the genius of Turner. He has a particular way of looking at things - discerning, sometimes a little callous, always out of the ordinary. When he meets Julia he falls blindly in love with her, unable to see her as she is.