This is the story of three terrible famines. The first is an Gorta Mór, the great hunger of Ireland, which began in 1846. The second is the 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 reappeared under the brutal dictator Mengistu in the 1980s. Keneally visited Eritrea in 1984 to see the effects of this grave event. Tom Keneally shares these three shocking histories with ...

Betsy Balcombe as a young woman lived with her family on St Helena. They befriended, served and were ruined by their relationship with Napoleon. To redeem the family's fortunes William Balcombe, Betsy's father, betrays Napoleon and accepts a job as the colonial treasurer of NSW, bringing his family with him. William never recovers from the ups and downs of association with Napoleon. His family however flourish in Australia and remain renowned pastoralists in Victoria. Tom Keneally, with hi...

Artem Samsurov, a charismatic protégé of Lenin and an ardent socialist, reaches sanctuary in Australia after escaping his Siberian labour camp and making a long, perilous journey via Japan. But Brisbane in 1911 turns out not to be quite the workers' paradise he was expecting, or the bickering local Russian émigrés a model of brotherhood. As Artem helps organise a strike and gets dangerously entangled in the death of another exile, he discovers that corruption, repression and injustice are ...

In the bitter Antarctic winter of 1910, in the waning years of the Edwardian era, a group of gentleman 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 Stewart - to discover which of his twenty-five carefully chosen men has become a murderer, as what has begun as a probe for the bottom of the world becomes a probe for the bottom of man's soul.

On the last, cold Sunday of February 1859, Daniel Sickles shot his wife's lover in Washington's Lafayette Square, just across from the White House. This is the story of that killing and its repercussions. Thomas Keneally brilliantly recreates an extraordinary period, when women were punished for violating codes of society that did not bind men. And the caddish, good-looking Dan Sickles personifies the extremes of the era: as a womaniser, he introduced his favourite madam to Queen Victoria ...

Next door to us, crowded on the east and west by large houses, was the Mantles' narrow little brick place. It seemed to be subsiding crookedly into the earth like an ill-laid tombstone, and was a sunless warren, dim humidity in summer, dim moisture in winter. The laneway to its back door ran flush against our side wall, and beneath the Mantles' lounge-room window, a furze of moss grew a quarter of inch thick on the mortar.

Jacko Emptor, Northern Territory born, brings Australian wildness to the television screens of America. Is America ready for him? Is he ready for America? Jacko, investigative reporter, exploits American innocence to break into living rooms and penetrate the heart's secrets. But these secrets make their claim on him too, especially the secrets of Sunny Sondquist, a child-woman missing in the American heartland. Follow Jacko as he exposes evil, falls from grace and shows how television make...

Naomi and Sally Durance are daughters of a dairy farmer from the Macleay Valley. Bound together in complicity by what they consider a crime, when the Great War begins in 1914 they hope to submerge their guilt by leaving for Europe to nurse the tides of young wounded. They head for the Dardanelles on the hospital ship Archimedes. Their education in medicine, valour and human degradation continues on the Greek island of Lemnos, then on the Western Front. Here, new outrages – gas, shell-shock...

As Father Stenner, Whitton's President, put it, 'a garish killing in a place for aspirants to the priesthood is, by the world's standards, an exotic crime.' Father Stenner's forebodings were, if anything, well short of the mark. The killer was apparently a madman whose first murder was to be merely the beginning of a bloody series. And into the maelstrom of violence and fear that he created came another and possibly even more sinister element, personified by a beautiful young woman named A...

Trapped behind barbed wire in an alien land, a man used to guarding his secrets is compelled to set the record straight... 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...

Alec Ramsey is the survivor of a disastrous Antarctic expedition which abandoned his revered friend and leader of the party, Stephen Leeming. For forty years, in the security of academia, Ramsey has nurtured with guilt his doubts about this incident. Now Leeming's body is, against all odds, to be exhumed from the Antarctic icecap, and Ramsey must confront his obsession and decide whether he really did - or can continue to - survive at all.

In the third instalment of the Monsarrat series, Hugh Llewelyn Monsarrat and his trusty housekeeper, Mrs Mulrooney, are sent to remote Maria Island to solve the murder of Bart Harefield, the detested cutter skipper who was responsible for bringing supplies and correspondence to the island. Bart knew that knowledge was currency and he wasn’t shy about reading the letters he brought across ... When Harefield is murdered with an axe, blame is laid at the feet of Thomas Power, the charismatic ...