Showing results by narrator "Paul English" in All Categories

“If the legendary Schindler’s List was not enough to showcase Thomas Keneally’s literary mastery, then [this novel] surely will” (New York Daily News) as the Booker Prize-winning author reimagines from all sides the drastic true events of the night more than one thousand Japanese POWs...

Machiavelli has been among the most commented upon, criticized and feared thinkers of the modern world. Infamous for his support of brutality and repression as valid political instruments, he is often portrayed as the pantomime villain of political theorists. In this whirlwind tour of Machiavelli's writings and eventful life, Nederman highlights the complexities in his thought, showing that he actually advocated democracy as much as dictatorship, debate as much as violence.

The acclaimed biography of James Packer. James Packer turns to Greek mythology in an attempt to explain the most exciting yet tumultuous period of his 50 years on earth. ""I was like Icarus,"" the billionaire tells his biographer, journalist Damon Kitney, of the heady days of 2016 when he broke...

In the warm alkaline waters of the public bath a headstrong young engineer accidentally collides with a beautiful actress. From this innocent collision of flesh begins a passion that takes them from the Wiltshire Downs to the most elemental choices of life and death in the Australian desert. Their intense romance is but part of the daring story that unfolds.

For most of human history, mental illness has been largely untreatable. Sufferers lived their lives - if they survived - in and out of asylums, accumulating life's wreckage around them. In 1948, all that changed when an Australian doctor and recently returned prisoner of war, working alone in a disused kitchen, set about an experimental treatment for one of the scourges of mankind - manic depression, or bipolar disorder. That doctor was John Cade and in that small kitchen he stirred up a miracle.

Travelling is something most of us do perfectly well. It often involves a stroll in the park or sojourn in the sun. Dominic Ryan, for reasons unfamiliar with common sense, is more likely to find himself facing down charging hippos on the Zambezi or tracking angry Namibian cheetahs in a vintage aeroplane. There is little in the way of logic in his backpack as he tumbles into a war zone in Ukraine or tries to save a rainforest by chasing bats. Is The Back of Beyond a memoir, travelogue or cry for help? It’s all of the above and by turns fascinating and funny, thrilling and thoughtful.

Kalu climbed high into a tree seeking the perfect leaf to roll into a pipe.... Softening one end in his mouth, he pressed down with his teeth to flatten the tube and blew. The sound, sweet and clear, rode the wind, snaking through the tree and down into the village. Set in the small Indian town of Hastinapore, we meet Kalu: just a young boy, without any family, living on the streets. As he plays his music, he doesn't realise there is a man resting against the trunk listening. And so Kalu and the healer meet, and Kalu’s life is changed forever.

Something has gone terribly wrong. Mel and his friends have been locked in Deep Trouble prison in the Mirrorscape, while their evil Mirrorshades - who look exactly like them - are free to cause havoc in Vlam. Luckily, their old friends Goldie and Pilfer - the invisible burglar - are on hand to help them break out and try to prove their innocence. But arson, forgery and theft are the least of what their doubles have been up to. They're involved in a plot that could destroy our heroes. The race to find the mysterious Mirrortree is on! Can the real Mel, Ludo and Wren defeat their enemies in time?

Thirteen-year-old Barnaby Fletch is a bag-and-bones orphan in London in the late 1700s.Barnaby lives on his wits and ill-gotten gains, on streets seething with the press of the throng and shadowed by sinister figures. Life is a precarious business.When he hears of a paradise on the other side of the world – a place called Botany Bay – he decides to commit a crime and get himself transported to a new life, a better life.

Imagine a faraway country that was once a friend of the West becoming the enemy, its people isolated and savagely repressed by a tyrant known as Great Uncle. As one of the country's most celebrated writers and a war hero, the storyteller has a better life than most – until he is made an offer he can't refuse. He must write a great novel, telling of the suffering of his people under the enemy's cruel economic sanctions and portraying Great Uncle as their saviour.

George Pell: leader of the Catholic Church in Australia, confessor to Tony Abbott. David Marr: the nation's leading biographer and investigative journalist. Cardinal George Pell is the most prominent Catholic leader in Australia at a time when the Church's handling of sexual abuse is being closely investigated. He is also the confessor of prime-minister-in-waiting Tony Abbott.

Western Australia, the wheatbelt. Lew McLeod has been travelling and working with Painter Hayes since he was a boy. Shearing, charcoal burning - whatever comes. Painter made him his first pair of shoes. It’s a hard and uncertain life, but it’s the only one he knows. But Lew’s a grown man now. And with this latest job, shearing for John Drysdale and his daughter Clara, everything will change. Stephen Daisley writes in lucid, rippling prose of how things work, and why.

Marr reveals a cleric at ease with power and aggressive in asserting the prerogatives of the Vatican. His account of Pell’s career focuses on his response as a man, a priest, an archbishop and prince of the church to the scandal that has engulfed the Catholic world in the last 30 years. This is the story of a cleric slow to see what was happening around him; torn by the contest between his church and its victims; and slow to realise that the Catholic Church cannot, in the end, escape secular scrutiny.

Melkin Womper is thrilled to escape his dull future as a village weaver and develop his artis-tic talent when he's apprenticed to Ambrosius Blenk, one of Vlam's most famous masters. Mel is especially excited by the colors that he'll be able to use, since color is a very expensive Pleasure, strictly controlled by the sinister Fifth Mystery. Mel can't wait to enjoy the wonders of the grand city and begin his important work for Blenk. Instead, his dreams are quickly crushed by the reality of days filled with unimportant tasks and bullying by the other apprentices.

A tale of longing, loss and growing love under the bright Australian sun. It's 1921, and the Great War has left in its wake untold tragedy, not only in lives lost but in the guilt of survivors, the deep-set scars of old wounds and the sting of redoubled bigotries. In the tiny hamlet of Sunshine, on the far-flung desert's edge, three very different ex-servicemen - Jack Bell, an Aboriginal horseman; Snow McGlynn, a laconic, curmudgeonly farmer and Art Lovelee, an eccentric engineer - find themselves sharing a finger of farmland along the Darling River, and not much else.

In the battle-smoke and chaos of Gallipoli, a young New Zealand soldier helps a Turkish doctor fighting to save a boy’s life. Then a shell bursts nearby; the blast that should have killed them both consigns them instead to the same military hospital. Mahmoud is a Sufi. A whirling dervish, he says, of the Mevlevi order. He tells David stories. Of arriving in London with a pocketful of dried apricots. Of Majnun, the man mad for love, and of the saint who flew to paradise on a lion skin. You are God, we are all gods, Mahmoud tells David; and a bond grows between them.

Failed Shakespearean actor and would-be private detective William Power returns to Melbourne in this wry sequel that re-creates the tension and fear of wartime Australia. Bloodied and broken but somehow unbowed, he arrives in a town struggling under war-rationing and full of cocky American soldiers and lands squarely in the bosom of his childhood home in Carlton, now dominated by his sister-in-law, the odious Darlene.

It's 1942, and war is raging in Europe and in the Pacific. The Japanese army is on Australia's doorstep, and the small coastal Queensland town of Maryborough is on full war footing. What they are not prepared for is the arrival in the town of a troupe of incompetent actors whose unjustifiably self-confident leader, William Power, is determined to bring his daring production of Titus Andronicus to the barbarians of rural Australia. Unfortunately for the Power Players, the only gift William Power has is a capacity for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In this audiobook you'll find what it takes to have an underlying sense of calm and equilibrium you can rely on the whole of your life. This is much more than feeling. It's a way of squeezing the most out of the up times, coping with the down times, and bouncing right back when things go completely off the rails. And best of all it requires no special skills and no effort. Calm: No Matter What shows you how to do this with one simple technique.

Mel, Ludo and Wren have to go back into the Mirrorscape - a world that mirrors the canvas of paintings, where everything comes alive. A world with a cloud city, tunnel-licking monsters and a battalion of moth bodyguards. The three friends must stop the demon-filled storms that threaten Vlam. But all the while the terrifying Morg is sniffing at their heels.... The second thrilling adventure in the Mirrorscape trilogy!