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This is your one chance. You have your secret dreams. Follow them! Make them come true ... In a poor village in northern China, a small boy is about to be taken away from everything he's ever known. He is so afraid, but his mother urges him to follow his dreams. For soon he will ...become a dancer, one of the finest dancers in the world...
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Will keeping the Japanese, Korean and Italian POWs of the Second World War alive in Australia keep Australian POWs alive and well wherever they are? Like The Daughters of Mars and all his best work, what this novel does so brilliantly is to explore the intimacies and extraordinar...y aspects of ordinary lives being played out against grand world events. And this time, the events take place on home turf. It is about the lives of the farmers, townspeople and soldiers training and working for this cataclysmic international event that is taking place at a distance. This is not the Western Front but a NSW farming community having to deal with 'the enemy'. Many of the townspeople and soldiers have husbands, sons, brothers who are away at war, missing, imprisoned or perhaps dead. The moral quandary they have is deciding how to treat these POWs in their midst.
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The first novel for adults from Australia's master storyteller: John Marsden. 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 s...inister 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. To succeed, he must survive the trials of Newgate Prison, the stinking hull of a prison ship and the unknown terrors of a journey across the world. And Botany Bay is far from the paradise Barnaby has imagined. When his past and present suddenly collide, he is soon fleeing for his life - once again. A riveting story of courage, hope and extraordinary adventure.
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Four years ago, in the small town of Birravale, Eliza Daley was murdered. Within hours, her killer was caught. Wasn't he? So reads the opening titles of Jack Quick's new true-crime documentary. A skilled producer, Jack knows that the bigger the conspiracy, the higher the ratings ...- and he claims Curtis Wade was convicted on flimsy evidence and shoddy police work. Millions of viewers agree. Just before the final episode, Jack uncovers a minor detail that may prove Curtis guilty after all. Convinced it will ruin his show, Jack disposes of the evidence and delivers the finale unedited, leading to Curtis's eventual release. Then a new victim is found bearing horrifying similarities to the original murder. Has Jack just helped a killer walk free? Determined to set things right, Jack returns to Birravale looking for answers. But with his own secrets lurking just beneath the surface, Jack knows more than anyone what a fine line it is between fact and fiction. Between life and death. Now there's only one option left. The truth.
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More than one million Australians can trace their heritage to the migrant ships of the mid-to-late 19th century ... The story of the Clipper ships, and the tens of thousands of migrants they brought to the Australian colony of the 19th century, is one of the world's great migrati...on stories. For anyone who travelled to Australia before 1850, it was a long and arduous journey that could take as much as four months. With the arrival of the clipper ships, and favourable winds, the journey from England could be done in a little over half this time. It was a revolution in travel that made the clipper ships the jet airlines of their day, bringing keen and willing migrants 'down under' in record time, all hell-bent on making their fortune in Australia. Rob Mundle is back on the water, with a ripping story that starts on the sea, aboard a clipper ship charging across the Southern Ocean, laden with passengers heading for Melbourne in response to the lure of gold. Brimming with countless stories of the magnificent ships and fearless (and feckless) characters we find on them, like Englishman 'Bully' Forbes and American 'Bully' Waterman driving their ships to the limit and the tragic legacy of the many shipwrecks that were so much a part of this era.
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From unbelievable poverty to international stardom - the inspiring true story of one boy's dream come true. Li Cunxin's bestselling biography in a young reader's edition, now available on MP3 CD. One day, not so very many years ago, a small peasant boy was chosen to study ballet ...at the Beijing Dance Academy. His mother urged him to take this chance of a lifetime. But Li was only eleven years old and he was scared and lonely, pushed away from all that he had ever known and loved. He hated the strict training routines and the strange place he had been brought to. All he wanted to do was go home - to his mother, father and six brothers, to his own small village. But soon Li realised that his mother was right. He had the chance to do something special with his life - and he never turned back. Plucked from poverty, Li Cunxin was brought to Beijing to learn ballet. Later, after defecting, he became a principal dancer in both the Houston and the Australian Ballets, ultimately becoming world renowned. Paul English's crisp accents march precisely through Chinese pronunciations and the difficult stories of Li's early life in Quingdao. Occasionally, English pauses on emotional peaks, portraying, for example, Li's fear when his mother faints from hunger and his loneliness while adjusting to life at the dance school. Mostly, English's level narration allows listeners to imagine the contrasts of Li's life - his incomprehension of the wealth and freedom he sees while visiting the U.S. and, soon after, his struggle to attain them. S.W. - AudioFile Magazine
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Son of a Norwegian master-mariner and grandson of Kaloni, the last of the great Polynesian navigators, Gunnar Thorkild is a man consumed by a dream. Convinced that the Polynesians' legendary Island of the Dead is real, he risks his career, his life-and those of his fellow adventu...rers-to find it. Shipwrecked on the very island they seek, the castaways are forced to leave behind everything they know and rely upon. To survive in this lush tropical paradise, they must make new laws of power and property, of sex and marriage.
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An astonishing examination of male friendship, set in Australia's wheatbelt. 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; of the profound satisfaction in hard work done with care, of love and friendship and the damage that both contain.
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Bestselling author As destiny weaves its tapestry in Lian Hearn's Tale of Shikanoko series, an emotionally rich and compelling drama plays out against a background of wild forests, elegant castles, hidden temples, and savage battlefields in Lord of the Darkwood. A self-assured wa...rrior stumbles into a game of Go that turns fatal. An ambitious lord leaves his nephew for dead and seizes his lands. A stubborn father forces his son to give up his wife to his older brother. A powerful priest meddles in the succession to the Lotus Throne. A woman of the Old People seeks five fathers for her five children, who will go on to found the Spider Tribe and direct the fate of the country.
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As destiny weaves its rich tapestry, a compelling drama plays out against a background of wild forests, elegant castles, hidden temples, and savage battlefields. This is the medieval Japan of Lian Hearn's imagination, where animal spirits clash with warriors and children navigate... a landscape as serene as it is deadly.
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