Böcker av Thomas Keneally

The award-winning author of modern classics such as Schindler’s List and Napoleon’s Last Island is at his triumphant best with this “engrossing and transporting” (Financial Times) novel about the adventures of Charles Dickens’s son in the Australian Outback during the 1860s.Edward Dickens, the tenth child of England’s most famous author Charles Dickens, has consistently let his parents down. Unable to apply himself at school and adrift in life, the teenaged boy is sent to Australia in the hopes that he can make something of himself—or at least fail out of the public eye. He soon finds himself in the remote Outback, surrounded by Aboriginals, colonials, ex-convicts, ex-soldiers, and very few women. Determined to prove to his parents and more importantly, himself, that he can succeed in this vast and unfamiliar wilderness, Edward works hard at his new life amidst various livestock, bushrangers, shifty stock agents, and frontier battles. By reimagining the tale of a fascinating yet little-known figure in history, this “roguishly tender coming-of-age story” (Booklist) offers penetrating insights into Colonialism and the fate of Australia’s indigenous people, and a wonderfully intimate portrait of Charles Dickens, as seen through the eyes of his son.

Following a lifetime observing Australia and its people, Tom Keneally turns inwards to reflect on what has been important to him. 'When I was born in 1935 I grew up, despite the Depression and World War II, with a primitive sense of being fortunate . . . The utopian strain was very strong . . . if we weren't to be a better society, if we were simply serfs designed to support a system of privilege, what was the bloody point?' Thomas Keneally has been observing, reflecting on and writing about Australia and the human condition for well over fifty years. In this deeply personal, passionately drawn and richly tuned collection he draws on a lifetime of engagement with the great issues of our recent history and his own moments of discovery and understanding. He writes with unbounded joy of being a grandparent, and with intimacy and insight about the prospect of death and the meaning of faith. He is outraged about the treatment of Indigenous Australians and refugees, and argues fiercely against market economics and the cowardice of climate change deniers. And he introduces us to some of the people, both great and small, who have dappled his life. Beautifully written, erudite and at times slyly funny, A Bloody Good Rant is an invitation to share the deep humanity of a truly great Australian. Praise for A Bloody Good Rant: 'Keneally enchants with beautiful prose . . . Moving, funny, angry and explorative, this book is far more than a series of rants, in the sense of mindless shouting. Keneally's breadth of interests, and the energy with which he involves us in them, makes for a volume of great interest. The reader may wish to engage with it more than once.' -Canberra Times 'This book stirs the emotions . . . This book is, at times, deeply personal and will be controversial.' -The Australian 'A Bloody Good Rant charms and beguiles in equal measure. Ranting Keneally is a marvellous creation.' Sydney Morning Herald 'insightful and entertaining . . . Keenly perceptive, wise and witty' -The Chronicle 'The problem with Tom Keneally's latest book is where to stop. After several starts and stops, this reviewer is convinced that the best solution is to ration it out to yourself: at a few chapters a week, it will last two months. And you will need that time to absorb his philosophy. Not because it is dense or presented in convoluted prose, but because he raises so many interesting explanations of current or historical events.' -Tintean

By the author of Schindler's Ark and master storyteller, Thomas Keneally, a vibrant novel about Charles Dickens' son and his adventures in the Australian Outback.

In a novel of breathtaking reach and inspired imagination, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's Ark tells the stories of two men who have much in common. What separates them is 42,000 years.Shade lives with his second wife amid their clan on the shores of a bountiful lake. A peaceable man, he knows that when danger threatens, the Hero ancestors will call on him to kill, or sacrifice himself, to save his people.Over 40,000 years later, Shade's remains are unearthed near the now dry Lake Learned in New South Wales. The sensational discovery fascinates Shelby Apple, a documentary film maker who tracks the controversies it provokes about who the continent's first inhabitants were and where Shade's bones belong.Shelby goes on to follow his own heroes to the battlefields of Eritrea and the Rift Valley where Homo sapiens sprang from. When he, too, faces mortality and looks back on his passions, ideals and sorely tested marriage, Learned Man stands as an enduring spirit, a fellow player in the long, ever-evolving story of humankind.

As the Civil War tears America apart, General Stonewall Jackson leads a troop of confederate soldiers towards the battle they believe will be a conclusive victory. Through their hopes, fears and losses, Keneally searingly conveys both the drama and mundane hardship of war, and brings to life one of the most emotive episodes in American history.

A timely, courageous and powerful novel about faith, the church, conscience and celibacy.

On the island of St Helena in the south Atlantic ocean, Napoleon spends his last years in exile. It is a hotbed of gossip and secret liaisons, where a blind eye is turned to relations between colonials and slaves.The disgraced emperor is subjected to vicious and petty treatment by his captors, but he forges an unexpected ally: a rebellious British girl, Betsy, who lives on the island with her family and becomes his unlikely friend.Based on fact, Napoleon's Last Island is the surprising story of one of history's most enigmatic figures and a British family who dared to associate with him. It is a tale of vengeance, duplicity and loyalty, and of a man whose charisma made him dangerous to the end.

On the edge of a small Australian town, far from the battlefields of the Second World War, a camp holds thousands of Japanese, Italian and Korean prisoners of war. The locals are unsure how to treat the 'enemy', though Alice Herman, whose young husband is himself a prisoner in Europe, becomes drawn to the Italian soldier sent to work on her father-in-law's farm. The camp commander and his deputy, each concealing a troubled private life, are disunited. And both fatally misread their Japanese captives, who burn with shame at being taken alive. The stage is set for a clash of cultures that has explosive, far-reaching consequences.

With his genial air of an Australian innocent, Jacko Emptor is New York's most public trespasser, invading people's homes at random for a live television show. Until he undertakes the televised hunt for a missing woman and, finally, meets a barrier even he will not transgress. The dramatic tale of Jacko's exploits probes the dubious ethics behind some television programmes and illuminates how a civilized society can harbour appalling evil.

In 1915, two spirited Australian sisters join the war effort as nurses, escaping the confines of their father's dairy farm and carrying a guilty secret with them. Used to tending the sick as they are, nothing could have prepared them for what they confront, first in the Dardanelles, then on the Western Front. Yet they find courage in the face of extreme danger and become the friends they never were before. And eventually they meet the kind of men worth giving up their precious independence for - if only they all survive.At once epic in scope and extraordinarily intimate, The Daughters of Mars brings the First World War to vivid life from an unusual perspective. Profoundly moving, it pays tribute to the men and women who voluntarily risked their lives for peace.

A young woman once told Thomas Keneally her life story. It was to lodge in his mind and haunt his imagination, becoming the kernel for this enthralling and emotive novel. It tells of a marriage that becomes a nightmare, of a distraught woman's flight, actual and symbolic, into the Australian interior, a story of pursuit, tragic accident and a final, strange catharsis.

The Booker Prize-winning author's "[I]important new book...As yet more glib headlines announce that East Africa is currently suffering a biblical failure of crops, rather than a failure of accountable government, this book could hardly be more urgent. "New York Times Book Review

In the waning years of the Edwardian era, a group of gentlemen wait out a raging blizzard in the perpetual darkness of the Antarctic winter, poised for a strike at the South Pole. As the storm lifts, a new challenge faces Captain Sir Eugene Stewart - to discover which of his twenty-five carefully chosen men has become a murderer. The quest for adventure has become a quest for justice.

In turn-of-the-century Australia, Tim Shea, supports his young family by running a general store in a remote riverside town, where he finds the same the same hypocrisy and snobbery which made him emigrate from Ireland, and suffers a series of misfortunes which take him to the brink of disaster. Capturing the spirit of the times, this is the mesmerising tale of a flawed hero whose stubborn integrity is nearly his undoing.

During the Eritrean struggle for independence from Ethiopia, four Westerners travel under Eritrean rebel escort through a land of savage beauty and bitter drought towards the ancient capital of Asmara. Each is on a personal mission, all are irrevocably changed as they bear witness to the devastation of war as well as to the Eritreans' courage and humanity in the face of constant attack.

A fascinating retelling of Oskar Schindler's extraordinary story and how it came to the world's attention through Thomas Keneally's Booker Prize-winning novel and the subsequent multiple Oscar-winning film, Schindler's List

In 1943, when Grace and Leo Waterhouse married in Australia, they were part of a young generation ready to sacrifice themselves to win the war, while being confident they would survive. Sixty years on, as Grace recounts what happened to her doomed hero, she can say what she suspected then: that for many men, bravery is its own end. The tale she tells is one of great love, lost innocence, a charismatic but unstable Irish commander, dashing undercover missions against the Japanese in Singapore, and - in her eyes - reckless, foolhardy exploits. As fresh details continue to emerge, Grace is forced to keep revising her picture of what happened to Leo and his fellow commandoes - until she learns about the final piece in the jigsaw, and an ultimate betrayal. As absorbing as it is thought-provoking, this timely novel poses unsettling questions about what drives men to battle and heroic deeds, and movingly conveys the life-long effect on those who survive them.

Winner of the Booker Prize and international bestseller

Tells the story of modern Australia begins in eighteenth-century Britain, where people were hanged for petty offences but crime was rife, and the gaols were bursting.

Schoolboy narrator Daniel Jordan, growing up in working-class Sydney during the Second World War, is confused by a world in which the religious dogma of his school conflicts with the communism of his family's terrifying neighbour, the 'Comrade'. Refreshingly unsentimental, this is the funny, ultimately tragic story of a boy struggling to understand a world in which concepts like innocence and guilt, good and evil are clearly open to interpretation.

Having - through his political connections - got away literally with murder, Sickles rehabilitated himself by founding the Excelsior Brigade and fighting in the Civil War.

The story of Joan of Arc has always held a special fascination for writers - among them Voltaire, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw and Jean Anouilh. Here Thomas Keneally transforms the legend, presenting a Joan who is at once a tough radical, an instinctive soldier, a nagging prophet and a touchingly vulnerable girl - a haunting and compelling heroine framed by the tumultuous times in which she lived.

In the 19th century the Irish population was halved. first the manine, second the Irish diaspora and the emigrations to places such as America and Canada and thridly the transportations of political activists to Australia. this is an important book in which the main political themes are fascinatingly explored.

Sydney, 1942, and in a nation threatened by a Japanese invasion, with husbands absent and sleek GIs present, a spirit of recklessness takes hold. Frank Darragh, an impressionable young priest, finds the line between saving others' souls and losing his own begins to blur as he becomes entangled with an attractive married woman, a m nage a trois, and a charismatic American sergeant.

When Palestinian guerillas hijack a flight from New York to Frankfurt, they find an Aboriginal dance troupe among the passengers. Similarly dispossessed of their land, whose side will the Aborigines take? Conflicts of loyalty, terror and revolutionary fervour form the explosive ingredients in this riveting and thought-provoking novel.

In 1789 in Sydney Cove, the remotest penal colony of the British Empire, a group of convicts and one of their captors unite to stage a play. As felons, perjurers and whores rehearse, their playmaker becomes strangely seduced. For the play's power is mirrored in the rich, varied life of this primitive land, and, not least, in the convict and actress, Mary Brenham.