Most Popular Books by Thomas Keneally

Inspired by a true incident, this powerful and disturbing novel focuses on Rudi Kabbel, a survivor of Nazi-occupied Belorussia, and Terry Delaney, a young Australian rugby player who falls in love with Kabbel''s daughter. With the optimism and innocence of those unscathed by war, Delaney gropes to understand Kabbel''s outlook on life and all too slowly grasps its implications.

In this playful and poignant memoir, Thomas Keneally returns to his adolescence in the suburbs of Sydney in 1952. At sixteen, the red-haired teenager idolized the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and had aspirations of becoming a star on the track or rugby field. He also dreamed of wooing the beautiful and alluring Bernadette Curran until the day she announces her desire to become a nun. For the first time, Keneally started to consider priesthood himself. An insightful portrait of the transition from childhood to adulthood, Homebush Boy affectionately captures the awkwardness, grace, and all the contradictions of being a teenager.

A tormented and humiliated mixed-race Australian man reaches his breaking point and takes terrifying revenge on his abusers in this critically acclaimed novel based on actual events In Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, Jimmie Blacksmith is desperate to figure out where he belongs. Half-Anglo and half-Aboriginal, he feels out of place in both cultures. Schooled in the ways of white society by a Protestant missionary, Jimmie forsakes tribal customs, adopts the white man’s religion, marries a white woman, and seeks a life of honest labor in a world Aborigines are normally barred from entering. But he will always be seen as less than human by the employers who cheat and exploit him, the fellow workers who deride him, and the wife who betrays him—and a man can only take so much. Driven by hopelessness, rage, and despair, Jimmie commits a series of savage and terrible acts of vengeance and becomes something he never thought he’d be: a murderer, a fugitive, and, ultimately, a legend. Based on shocking real-life events, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is a powerful tale of racism, identity, intolerance, and murder from the celebrated bestselling author of Schindler’s List, Thomas Keneally. This magnificent historical novel remains a stunning, provocative, and profoundly affecting reading experience.

A young Catholic priest in a teaching seminary finds endless difficulties with the strict authoritarianism of the church establishment.

La 4è de couverture indique : " A young doctor struggles to run a hospital on a small island off the Dalmatia coast under the devastating and barbarous conditions of World War II and has passionate, necessarily clandestine affair with a partisan heroine"

Australian historical novel. When sisters Dimp and Prim Bettany discover the memoirs of their ancestor John Bettany they are drawn into the world of their family''s past. As they read about John''s adventures living on the land of the Aboriginal Moth people and his romantic correspondence with convict woman Sarah Bernard, they look at their own lives in a new light. Author''s previous titles include ''Schindler''s Ark'', winner of the 1982 Booker Prize and filmed as the Oscar-winning ''Schindler''s List'' by Steven Spielberg.

A retelling of the life and exploits of Irish patriot John Mitchel, with a particular focus on his time in exile on Van Diemen''s Land.

The first volume of a unique history of Australia where people are always centre stage, from bestselling author Thomas Keneally who brings to life the vast range of characters who have formed our national story.

After a successful American tour the four members of the Barramatjara Aboriginal Dance Troup fly out from New York on a plane bound for Frankfurt, their next performance destination. Shortly after the takeoff terrorists emerge from amongst the passengers and by force of arms quickly transfer the plane into a flying prison. As a result of information received by means of a sophisticated intelligence network, the terrorists take three hostages.

A memoir of Tom''s journey around the world to discover the complete story of Oskar Schindler and that list. In 1980 Tom Keneally was in Beverley Hills returning from the Sorrento film festival where The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith had been showing. Looking for a new briefcase, Tom meets the Polish-Jewish Leopold Pfefferberg Page aka Poldek and his life for the next few years is taken over by this charismatic and driven man and the story he wants shared. "It''s a story for you, I swear," he says to Tom. The story is of course that of ''The all-drinking, all-screwing, all black-marketeering Nazi. But to me he was Jesus Christ, Oskar Schindler". And Poldek shared with Tom the story of Schindler''s Ark which went on to win the Booker Prize and ultimately to become the Oscar award-winning film Schindler''s List. Schindler, the ruined Catholic hedonist, had something ambiguous about him that appealled to the ex-seminarian Tom Keneally who still struggled with his own Catholicism and his humanist view of the world. Oskar showed that virtue, regardless of race, creed or religion, emerged where it would. Tom was a small child during WWII and these memories, along with the appeal of Schindler and Poldek''s insistence, influenced him to write the book Schindler''s Ark . Oskar and his Jews reduced the Holocaust - an almost untellable story in its scope and devastation - to an understandable human scale. Searching For Schindler is very much Tom''s journey, he reflects on his early days as a writer with quite a bit of success - but no confidence - and how this book, the people he met, and the film it became, changed his life. From his Sydney home, he tracked down the main player''s in Poldek and Schindler''s story. Tom and Poldek travelled across the US, Germany, Israel, Austria and Poland interviewing survivors and discovering extraordinary stories. Schindler''s Ark took a huge toll on Tom, and his family, he had never been so overwhelmed by the writing of a story. It forced him to think about Australians and their attitudes to the Holocaust, to think about the Israel / Palestine situation and about families. Not ready to give up the story of Schindler and his Jews after the enormous success of the book, Tom is there for the film adaptation and on set for the filming. Filled with stories of Steven Spielberg, Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes and many other well-known and strong characters Searching For Schindler gives Tom Keneally scope to show the wonderful, warm, thinking, compassionate and very funny man that he is.

Charming gentleman convict Hugh Monsarrat returns in this second novel in the thrilling and spellbinding historical crime series from Thomas Keneally and his daughter Meg Keneally featuring his signature “fresh and engaging” (The New York Times) prose. Recently arrived from Port Macquarie, ticket-of-leave gentleman convict Hugh Llewelyn Monsarrat now lives in a small but comfortable house in Parramatta with his loyal housekeeper, Mrs. Mulrooney. Monsarrat is now working for the Attorney General’s office, officially as a clerk, but also as an unofficial advisor on criminal and legal matters. One day, he is informed that the superintendent of the female prison, Robert Church, has been murdered. Apparently, a female convict named Grace O’Leary held a particular grudge against him and is being detained for questioning. Monsarrat’s task is to take a statement from her. Grace doesn’t strike Monsarrat as a murderer and she insists she’s innocent. Monsarrat and Mrs. Mulrooney both believe her, but are at a loss as to how to help her. A number of people held grudges against Church and many are relieved by his death, but who would go so far as to murder him?

A standout history told with Tom Keneally panache. This is the story of three great famines. The first is an Gorta M r, the great hunger of Ireland, which began in 1846 and whose end-date is a matter of debate. The second is the less well-known but more deadly famine that struck Bengal in 1943. The third is the Ethiopian famine, which first sprung up in lethal form in the 1970s under Emperor Haile Selassie and then again under the brutal dictator Mengistu in the 1980s. Keneally himself visited Eritrea in 1984 to see the effects of this grave event. In those who suffered these famines; in those who denied their suffering; in those who propounded theories to excuse it; in those who - against the wishes of each government - told the world what was happening; and in those who tried to relieve it, there is a remarkable continuity of impulse and experience and dilemma. Though these famines are diverse, they are in many ways as similar as if they were related by DNA, or a malignant force of fallibility. Tom Keneally shares these three shocking histories with his customary penetrating wisdom, and he presents a controversial theory in his utterly compelling narrative- in all three famines, ideology, mindsets of governments, racial preconceptions and administrative incompetence were, ultimately, more lethal than the initiating blights, the loss of potatoes or rice or the grain named teff.

This story explores the ambivalent relationship between children and their parents by means of a fable charged with poetry, compassion, and shocking comedy. When Barbara Glover reached puberty, her parents suddenly assumed bodily forms so unnatural that they had to be kept from the world and tended like farm animals. Uncertain of whether she or they caused the "accident", she has found herself bound in dominance over them, impelled by a fierce love to organise them and her younger brother around the family''s affliction. Now this equilibrium is doubly threatened: the mother has a fatal disease of her species, and the brother is trying to break into a life and love outside the family.

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.

During a bout of appendicitis, ten-year-old Ned Kelly is reduced to the size of a bee and spends the summer in a beehive.

Australia emerged from World War I into a decade of profound change, characterised by a revolution in behaviour amongst the young; by the first great age of consumerism; and by secret right wing armies and the growth of the Communist Party. As in the two previous volumes of Australians, Thomas Keneally brings history to vivid and pulsating life as he traces the lives and the deeds of Australians known and unknown. He follows the famous and the infamous through the Great Crash and the rise of Fascism, and explains how Australia was inexorably drawn into a war that led her forces into combat throughout Asia, Africa, Europe and the Pacific. At home an atmosphere of fear grew with the fall of Singapore and the bombing of Darwin, the Japanese advance and then the arrival of General MacArthur. The 1950s-depicted by some as an age of full employment, by others as the age of suburban spread and boredom under the serene prime ministership of Robert Menzies-were as complicated as Menzies himself. Most Australians believed there would be nuclear war before the end of the decade. The Korean War and British testing of the atomic bomb in South Australia were seen as preludes. With the defection of the Soviet spy Ivan Petrov, Australians were convinced they were living in the last of days. On the street, the face of Australia was undergoing an Italian, Greek and Slavic-led change. And in even greater upheaval, Asian trade and immigration were coming our way as we advanced towards a war in Vietnam and the firming of the American alliance. The result of masterly writing and exhaustive research, this volume of Australians brings our more recent history to vibrant and robust life.

"The classic by Booker Prize-winner Thomas Keneally When Jimmie Blacksmith marries a white woman, the backlash from both Jimmie''s tribe and white society initiates a series of dramatic events. As Jimmie tries to survive between two cultures, tensions reach a head when the Newbys, Jimmie''s white employers, try to break up his marriage. the Newby women are murdered and Jimmie flees, pursued by police and vigilantes. the hunt intensifies as further murders are committed, and concludes with tragic results. thomas Keneally''s fictionalised account of the 1900 killing spree of half-Aboriginal Jimmy Governor is a powerful story of a black man''s revenge against an unjust and intolerant society."

A South Pacific penal colony in the late eighteenth century. An honest man named Phelim Halloran and Ann Rush, his secret bride. Poet, soldier, lover and grand innocent, Halloran must confront his destiny in a place of tyranny and searing horror.

This national bestseller by the highly-acclaimed author of "Schindler''s List" tells the deeply moving and spellbinding story of an alienated Australian journalist''s soul-searching journey across a war-torn Africa.

In the bitter Antarctic winter of 1910, in the waning years of the Edwardian era, a group of gentlemen adventurers wait out a raging blizzard in the close, perpetual darkness, poised for a strike at the South Pole. As the storm lifts, a new challenge faces Captain Sir Eugene Steward - to discover which of his twenty-five carefully chosen men has become a murderer - and what began as a probe for the bottom of the world becomes a probe for the depths of a man''s soul.

Bestselling author Thomas Keneally brings to life the vast range of characters who have formed our national story, in the second volume of a unique history of Australia.

Offers an incisive study of a turning point in our history and a revealing portrait of its pivotal figure, the self-made man who rose from obscurity to lead the nation through its most tumultuous times.

Biography of a rugby league utility player with Sydney''s Manly Club who has also represented Australia in international competitions. The author, whose previous books include the 1982 Booker Prize winner ''Schindler''s Ark'' and, more recently, ''Our Republic'', is an ardent rugby league fan.

Novel based in war-time Sydney in 1942, telling the story of Father Frank Darragh, an impressionable young priest. When one of his young parishioners is found brutally murdered he is lead on a journey of personal discovery. The highly successful author began his career in 1964 and has written 25 works of fiction and 7 non-fiction titles. His Booker prize-winning title ''Schindler''s Ark'' was adapted to screen as ''Schindler''s List'', directed by Steven Spielberg.

Oscar Schindler, a German industrialist, a Catholic, arrives in Cracow after the German conquest of Poland in 1939. Secretly disgusted by what he sees his countrymen doing, he sets up a factory, and although it is part of the prison-camp complex, he manages to protect his Jewish laborers and their dependents. When the German retreat begins, he sets up a second factory in his native Sudetenland and succeeds in transferring his work force there, while keeping the SS at bay. At the end of the war, he has saved over a thousand lives.

Hailed as one of the year''s top five novels by "Time, " and selected as one of the best books of the year by nearly all major newspapers, national bestseller "Peace Like a River" is now available in paperback. In "lyrical, openhearted prose" (Michael Glitz, "The New York Post"), Enger tells the story of 11-year-old Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy who has reason to believe in miracles. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.