A fascinating insight into Breaker Morant and the question of morality and human life. The question of "The Breaker's" innocence is still being fiercely debated more than a century after Lieutenant Harry Morant and Lieutenant Peter Handcock were shot on a lonely veldt outside Pretoria at dawn on 27 February, 1902, by a British military firing squad. Shoot Straight, You Bastards! is a universal account of greed, ambition and the power of the political machine that crushes anyone wh...

The Unsavoury Tale of Alexander Pearce - The Convict Cannibal.Powerful and relentless, the hunger pursues you like a wild beast without respite. You can resist it for hours, even days, but it eventually overwhelms your reason with its desperate desire to be satisfied. Eat or be eaten ... that was the terrible choice facing the eight convict bolters from Macquarie Harbour, Australia's most remote and brutal penal colony. Lost and starving after a week in a wilderness no white man ha...

A classic tale of betrayal, injustice and vengeance from the roaring days of the Victorian gold rush.'I'm not a criminal. I've been driven to this life ... I was held for a month in gaol, an innocent man. While I was away me wife ran away with a policeman ... Then I was arrested for the mail coach robbery and held another month before I was let out on bail. When I came home, I found my house burned down and cattle perished of thirst, left locked in yards ... By Gawd, Mr Norton, it'...

In much the same way that Bruce Beresford's award-winning feature film Breaker Morant captured the popular imagination, Shoot Straight, You Bastards! is an explosive read - as controversial an event today as it was 100 years ago. Too many people have tried to put a halt to the 'wheel of history' by insisting that all has now been revealed and theirs is the definitive word. But there's always more, as this book will reveal.

The author of Bloody Belfast delivers "a vivid and unforgettable record" of the Northern Irish conflict that captures the "true horrors of war" ( Best of British).There are stories from some of the most seminal moments during the troubles in Northern Ireland—the Crossmaglen firefights, the 1988 corporals killings, the Ballygawley bus bombing, and more—told from the perspective of the British soldiers who served there between 1969 and 1998. This wa...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTUREA mission to Mars. A freak accident. One man’s struggle to survive. From the author of Project Hail Mary comes “a hugely entertaining novel that reads like a rocket ship afire” (Chicago Tribune).“Brilliant . . . a celebration of human ingenuity [and] the purest example of real-science sci-fi for many years . . . utterly compelling.”—The Wall Stre...

NOW THE ACCLAIMED HBO SERIES GAME OF THRONES—THE MASTERPIECE THAT BECAME A CULTURAL PHENOMENONHere is the first book in the landmark series that has redefined imaginative fiction and become a modern masterpiece.A GAME OF THRONESIn a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. The cold is returning, and in the frozen wastes to the North of Winterfell, sinister and supernatural forces are m...

'Great Australian Stories is true to its title as it wanders from bush track to spooky hollow, follows the path of yowies and bunyips, searches for Lasseter's Reef, meets Dad and Dave and, on a different path, Henny-Penny, and then rambles into the cities where just as many entertaining characters are ready to tell their stories.' - From the foreword by Warren FaheyAustralia has a rich tradition of storytelling that reflects our unique history and experie...

Explosive SAS action in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan.The command came: 'Stop those vehicles!'It was like a red rag to a bull. Instantly streams of 7.62 mm tracer and 50 mm calibre machine gun rounds arced across the night sky and smashed into the bus and truck.Elite SAS Patrol Commander Stuart 'Nev' Bonner takes us inside the extraordinary and dangerous world of secret combat operations in this explosive, behind-the-scenes look at life inside the...

On Patrol with the SAS takes the reader into the heart and soul of the men of the Australian Army's Special Air Services Regiment. It provides a clear insight into the rigours of the SAS selection process, training for war in Papua New Guinea, then in graphic and sometimes raw and brutal detail into combat behind enemy lines in Borneo and South Viet Nam.'It is an engrossing soldier's story. One in which the qualities of the men, their mental, physical and psychological tou...

Cross-dressing convicts, effeminate bushrangers and women-shortage woes – here is the first ever history of sex in Australia, from Botany Bay to the present-day.In this fascinating social history, Frank Bongiorno uses striking examples to chart the changing sex lives of Australians. Tracing the story up to the present, Bongiorno shows how the quest for respectability always has another side to it.Along the way he deals with some intriguing questions – What did it mean to be...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE AHRC'S ANNUAL HUMAN RIGHTS MEDALS AND AWARDSThe first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a sharp decline in respect for human rights and the international rule of law. The legal conventions of the new realpolitik seem to owe more to Guantanamo than Geneva.Australia has tarnished its reputation in the field of human rights, through its support for illegal warfare, its failure to honour international conventions, its refusal to de...