(From the acclaimed author of Schindlers List, the epic, ...)
From the acclaimed author of Schindlers List, the epic, unforgettable story of two sisters from Australia, both trained nurses, whose lives are transformed by the cataclysm of the first World War.
From the acclaimed author of Schindlers List comes the epic, unforgettable story of two sisters whose lives are transformed by the cataclysm of the First World War.
IN 1915, Naomi and Sally Durance, two spirited Australian sisters, join the war effort as nurses, escaping the confines of their fathers farm and carrying a guilty secret with them. Though they are used to tending the sick, nothing could have prepared them for what they confront, first on a hospital ship near Gallipoli, then on the Western Front.
Yet amid the carnage, the sisters become the friends they never were at home and find themselves courageous in the face of extreme danger and also the hostility from some on their own side. There is great bravery, humor, and compassion, too, and the inspiring example of the remarkable women they serve alongside. In France, where Naomi nurses in a hospital set up by the eccentric Lady Tarlton while Sally works in a casualty clearing station, each meets an exceptional man: the kind of men for whom they might give up some of their newfound independenceif only they all survive.
At once vast in scope and extraordinarily intimate, The Daughters of Mars brings World War I vividly to life from an uncommon perspective. Thomas Keneally has written a remarkable novel about suffering and transcendence, despair and triumph, and the simple acts of decency that make us human even in a world gone mad.
(From one of our greatest living writers, a bold and timel...)
From one of our greatest living writers, a bold and timely novel about sin cloaked in sacrament, shame that enforces silence, and the courage of one priest who dares to speak truth to power.
Sent away from his native Australia to Canada due to his radical preaching against the Vietnam War, apartheid, and other hot button issues, Father Frank Docherty made for himself a satisfying career as a psychologist and monk. When he returns to Australia to lecture on the future of celibacy and the Catholic Church, he is unwittingly pulled into the lives of two peoplea young man, via his suicide note, and an ex-nunboth of whom claim to have been sexually abused by a prominent monsignor.
As a member of the commission investigating sex abuse within the Church, and as a man of character and conscience, Docherty decides he must confront each party involved and try to bring the matter to the attention of both the Church and the secular authorities. What follows will shake him to the core and call into question many of his own choices.
This riveting, profoundly thoughtful novel is the work of a richly experienced and compassionate writer with an understanding of a deeply wounded culture (Sydney Morning Herald). It is an exploration of what it is to be a person of faith in the modern world, and of the courage it takes to face the truth about an institution you love.
(As the Civil War tears America apart, General Stonewall J...)
As the Civil War tears America apart, General Stonewall Jackson leads a troop of Confederate soldiers on a long trek north towards the battle they believe will be a conclusive victory. Through their hopes, fears and losses, Keneally conveys both the drama and mundane hardship of war, and brings to life one of the most emotive episodes in American history.
American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles
(Hero, adulterer, bon vivant, murderer and rogue, Dan Sick...)
Hero, adulterer, bon vivant, murderer and rogue, Dan Sickles led the kind of existence that was indeed stranger than fiction. Throughout his life he exhibited the kind of exuberant charm and lack of scruple that wins friends, seduces women, and gets people killed. In American Scoundrel Thomas Keneally, the acclaimed author of Schindlerâs List, creates a biography that is as lively and engrossing as its subject.
Dan Sickles was a member of Congress, led a controversial charge at Gettysburg, and had an affair with the deposed Queen of Spainâamong many other women. But the most startling of his many exploits was his murder of Philip Barton Key (son of Francis Scott Key), the lover of his long-suffering and neglected wife, Teresa. The affair, the crime, and the trial contained all the ingredients of melodrama needed to ensure that it was the scandal of the age. At the trialâs end, Sickles was acquitted and hardly chastened. His life, in which outrage and accomplishment had equal force, is a compelling American tale, told with the skill of a master narrative.
(The Australian novelist recounts his experiences travelin...)
The Australian novelist recounts his experiences traveling in Ireland, the country from which his forebears came, and discusses what he has learned about the Irish people
(The acclaimed bestselling classic of Holocaust literature...)
The acclaimed bestselling classic of Holocaust literature, winner of the Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, and the inspiration for the classic filma masterful account of the growth of the human soul (Los Angeles Times Book Review).
A stunning novel based on the true story of how German war profiteer and factory director Oskar Schindler came to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other single person during World War II. In this milestone of Holocaust literature, Thomas Keneally, author of Daughter of Mars, uses the actual testimony of the SchindlerjudenSchindlers Jewsto brilliantly portray the courage and cunning of a good man in the midst of unspeakable evil.
(Keneally's magnificent story of a young officer in a pena...)
Keneally's magnificent story of a young officer in a penal colony during the founding days of Australia transports readers through layer after layer of life in Sydney Cove, Australia. Advertising in New York Review of Books and Village Voice Literary Supplement.
(
The outstanding first volume of acclaimed author Thomas...)
The outstanding first volume of acclaimed author Thomas Keneally's major new three-volume history of Australia brings to life the vast range of characters who have formed Australia's national story
Convicts and Aborigines, settlers and soldiers, patriots and reformers, bushrangers and gold seekersit is from their lives and their stories that Tom Keneally has woven a vibrant history to do full justice to the rich and colorful nature of Australia's unique national character. The story begins by looking at European occupation through Aboriginal eyes, moving between the city slums and rural hovels of 18th-century Britain and the shores of Port Jackson. Readers spend time on the low-roofed convict decks of transports and see the bewilderment of the Eora people as they see the first ships of turaga, or "ghost people." They follow the daily round of Bennelong and his wife Barangaroo and the tribulations of warrior Windradyne. Convicts like Solomon Wiseman and John Wilson find their feet and even fortune, while Henry Parkes' arrival as a penniless immigrant gives few clues to the national statesman he was to become. Chinese diggers trek to the goldfields, and revolutionaries like Italian Raffaello Carboni and black American John Joseph bring readers the drama of the Eureka uprising. Tom Keneally has brought to life the high and the low, the convict and the free of early Australian society. This is truly a new history of Australia, by an author of outstanding literary skill and experience, whose own humanity permeates every page.
(
Betsy Balcombe as a young woman lived with her family o...)
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 his gift for bringing historical stories to life, shares this remarkable friendship and the beginning of an Australian dynasty.
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The second volume of bestselling author Thomas Keneally...)
The second volume of bestselling author Thomas Keneally's unique trilogy of Australian history in which people are always center stage
In the continuation of an impeccably researched, engagingly written people's history, this is the story of Australia through people from all walks of life, from Eureka to Gallipoli. From the 1860s to the great rifts wrought by World War I, an era commenced in which Australian pursued glimmering visions: of equity in a promised land. Immigrants and Aboriginal resistance figures, bushrangers and pastoralists, working men and pioneering women, artists and hard-nosed radicals, politicians and soldiers all populate this richly drawn portrait of a vibrant land on the cusp of nationhood and social maturity. This is truly a new history of Australia, by an author of outstanding literary skill and experience, and whose own humanity permeates every page.
Thomas Michael Keneally is a prolific Australian novelist, playwright, and essayist.
Background
Keneally was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1935. Both Keneally's parents (Edmund Thomas Keneally and Elsie Margaret Coyle) were born to Irish fathers in the timber and dairy town of Kempsey, New South Wales, and, though born in Sydney, his early years were also spent there.
Education
The son of Roman Catholic parents of Irish descent, he was educated at St. Patrick's College in Strathfield, New South Wales, and later studied for the priesthood from 1953 to 1960.
While Keneally left the seminary before being ordained, he later drew on his experiences as a seminarian in his early novels The Place at Whitton (1964) and Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968).
Career
While Keneally left the seminary before being ordained, he later drew on his experiences as a seminarian in his early novels The Place at Whitton (1964) and Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968).
He taught high school in Sydney during the early 1966, and from 1968 to 1970 served as a lecturer in drama at the University of New England in New South Wales. During this time Keneally gained recognition as a historical novelist with the publication of Bring Larks and Heroes (1967), a consideration of Australia's early history as an English penal colony.
Early Novels Keneally's early works tend to reflect his interests in spiritual matters and contemporary social issues. In the allegorical novel A Dutiful Daughter (1971), which Garry Wills of the New York Times Book Review called "an extraordinary book in every way, " Keneally drew a nightmarish portrait of a close-knit family coping with the sudden and incomprehensible transformation of the parents into creatures half-cow and half-human. While the college-age son begins to turn away from his extraordinary family situation, his sister becomes increasingly defined by it.
Racism and violence, two social issues that figure prominently in many of Keneally's works, are closely examined in his acclaimed early work The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972).
In the novel Keneally depicted an incident that occurred in New South Wales in 1900 in which a mixed-race aborigine exploded into a murderous rage following persistent racist treatment by white settlers.
The novel, which is based on contemporary newspaper accounts of the tragedy, is also considered an early expression of Keneally's antiassimilationist views of race relations. It won the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature in 1973. With Keneally's next work, Blood Red, Sister Rose: A Novel of the Maid of Orleans (1974), he turned from writing local history to world history and introduced a recurring interest in warfare into his oeuvre.
Keneally's portrait of Joan of Arc in Blood Red, Sister Rose is considered objective and human, emphasizing her everyday qualities within the uncommon context of fifteenth-century warfare. A. G. Mojtabai, in the New York Times Book Review, commented on Keneally's unusual choice in retelling such a well-known story.
Novels of the Late 1976 A Victim of the Aurora (1977) combines the adventure of Antarctic exploration with the intrigue of a classic murder mystery.
Praising A Victim of the Aurora in the Listener Neil Hepburn located the importance of the novel in "Keneally's clear-sighted view of how vulnerable conventional men are to the poisoned authority of great leaders, and of how calmly the best of us can be led to sanction abominations in the name of the common good. " The setting of Passenger, another of Keneally's novels of the late 1976, is perhaps "the most exotic, " according to Blake Morrison in the New Statesman.
The narrator of the novel is the unborn child of a historical novelist who is researching an eighteenth-century convict ancestor who was transported to Australia from Ireland. Morrison characterized the device as "the Romantic idea of insightful childhood pushed one step further-the wise womb, " and Hermione Lee, writing in the Observer, called the novel "a witty variant on the picaresque tradition. " Historical War Novels In addition to the balanced portrait of Joan of Arc, Blood Red, Sister Rose drew critical praise for its realistic depiction of the brutality of medieval warfare.
The Cut-Rate Kingdom (1980), set in Canberra in 1942, considers the moral character of military and political leaders in wartime Australia.
In Gossip from the Forest, Keneally offered a concentrated fictional presentation of the peace talks that took place in the forest of Compiegne in November 1918, focusing on the highest-ranking German negotiator, Mattias Erzberger, a liberal pacifist.
Confederates is counted among Keneally's most ambitious historical undertakings in its faithful representation of the military life of a band of southern soldiers preparing for the Second Battle of Antietam in the summer of 1862.
Covering a range of characters, including slaves, farmers, and aristocrats, the novel, in the opinion of Jeffrey Burke of the New York Times Book Review, "reaffirms Mr. Keneally's mastery of narrative voice. "
Schindler's List While the film version of Schindler's List, brought world fame to Keneally, the work had already brought literary fame-as well as controversy-when it won the Booker McConnell fiction prize in 1982. Like many of Keneally's works, the novel is based on historical events during wartime, and in the case of Schindler's List, reflects the testimony of surviving participants who were interviewed by Keneally for the book; some critics argued that for that reason it should be excluded from the fiction category.
Published in England as Schindler's Ark, the work resulted from Keneally's chance encounter with Leopold Pfefferberg, one of the 1, 300 Jewish factory workers saved by Schindler. Keneally was shopping for a new briefcase when he entered a Los Angeles store owned by Pfefferberg, who related the Schindler story to Keneally and subsequently assisted him in interviewing dozens of other survivors of the group now known as Schindlerjuden.
Like Keneally's earlier portraits of historical individuals, the depiction of Oskar Schindler is considered complex and human.
An opportunistic businessman who prospered during the war, Schindler owned an armaments factory that supplied war materials to the German army and drew laborers from nearby concentration camps. By convincing Nazi authorities-through "[b]ribes and bluff, cognac and con-man effrontery, " according to Peter Kemp in the Listener-to allow him to establish his own labor camp he saved the lives of his workers.
After the success of Schindler's List Keneally focused on another aspect of Holocaust subject matter in his 1985 novel A Family Madness. Based on the mass suicide of a family of five in suburban Sydney in July 1984, the novel traces the legacy of guilt that impairs the lives of Nazi collaborators and their children.
John Sutherland, comparing the novel to Schindler's List in the London Review of Books, proclaimed A Family Madness "better than its applauded predecessor. "
Later Works Keneally turned to contemporary warfare with his 1989 novel To Asmara: A Novel of Africa, a fictional consideration of civil strife in Ethiopia during the 1986. The novel depicts the struggle of the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front to overcome Ethiopian domination as witnessed by the narrator, an Australian journalist.
In a departure from works based in fact and drawing broad portraits of war and its impact on individual lives, Keneally's 1991 novel Flying Hero Class confines its scope to events taking place on an airplane hijacked en route from Frankfurt to New York. Woman of the Inner Sea (1992) returns to fact-based fiction with its portrayal of a woman who seeks to redefine herself in the Australian outback after losing her husband to another woman and her children in a fire.
The 1995 novel A River Town draws on the experiences of Keneally's Irish ancestors in portraying the difficulties encountered by turn-of-the-century Irish immigrants to Australia. The novel's protagonist, the grocer Tim Shea, who extends generous credit to his neighbors and ends up bankrupt, is based on Keneally's grandfather, Tim Keneally, who settled in Kempsey, New South Wales.
Career in the 1996 Keneally's reputation rests primarily on his prolific fiction output, yet he has also written a number of nonfiction works on Australia as well as the travel books Now and in Time to Be: Ireland and the Irish (1992) and The Place Where Souls Are Born: A Journey into the Southwest (1992).
Keneally lived in the United States and taught at the University of California at Irvine during the early 1996. An advocate of Australian separation from the British Commonwealth, he founded and chaired the Australian Republic Movement, a political group devoted to that end.
During the mid-1996 he was researching the lives of escaped Australian transportees who fled to the United States and established new lives. He was also planning a sequel to A River Town and hoped eventually to trace the Shea family through the World War I era.
He grew up in the Roman Catholic family. Keneally studied at the St Patrick's Seminary, Manly to train as a Catholic priest.
Views
In a number of subsequent works Keneally approached the subject of war from varying perspectives, including the thoughts of a World War I peace negotiator in Gossip from the Forest (1975), the activities of a doctor involved with partisans during World War II in Season in Purgatory (1977), and the preparations of American Civil War soldiers for battle in Confederates (1979).
Quotations:
Assessing Keneally's strengths in Publisher's Weekly, Steinberg wrote: "In ancient times, Tom Keneally would have been a Celtic bard, such is his gift for wielding narrative and anecdote, witty quip and resonant observation. While his books never scant on storytelling brio, however, his work also reflects a concern for life's ambiguous challenges, glancing ironies and opportunities for moral behavior. "
In a 1995 interview with Sybil Steinberg of Publishers Weekly, Keneally himself commented: "I was convinced of the moral force of the story. .. . Stories of fallen people who stand out against the conditions that their betters succumb to are always fascinating. It was one of those times in history when saints are no good to you and only scoundrels who are pragmatic can save souls. "
Discussing A Family Madness in Contemporary Novelists, Keneally commented that the novel's contemporary setting is "significant. .. . I believe the historic phase is nearly over for me and was merely a preparation for the understanding of the present. "
Personality
According to A. N. Wilson in Encounter, Schindler "was a swindler, a drunkard, and a womaniser. And yet, had he not been these things, he would not have been able to rescue hundreds of Jews from the concentration camps. "
Quotes from others about the person
According to Mojtabai, "We all know the story, the big scenes: the Voices, the Dauphin's court, Orleans, Rheims, Rouen, the pyre. .. . It would seem foolhardy to attempt to revive these worn tales again. Yet Australian novelist Thomas Keneally has done it and carried it off with aplomb. St. Joan lives again, robustly, in a way we have not known her before. "
According to the New York Times Book Review's Paul Fussell, Gossip from the Forest "is a study of the profoundly civilian and pacific sensibility beleaguered by crude power. .. . it is absorbing, and as history it achieves the kind of significance earned only by sympathy acting on deep knowledge. "
Similarly, Lorna Sage noted in the Observer that as "Keneally presents him in the novel Schindler becomes, by almost imperceptible stages, a three-dimensional 'good' man, at once alive and in love with life, without ever seeming 'fated' or heroic or unnatural. "
Angela Carter, in the New York Times Book Review, described the novel as a "spirited expressionist performance" that displayed "a diabolical ingenuity. " Muriel Haynes, in the Saturday Review found the work "modeled loosely on the Christian legend of redemption" and judged it "the boldest expression yet of [Keneally's] war against moribund doctrine and its crippling of living religious faith. "
In a favorable review of the novel in the Spectator, Peter Ackroyd noted that Keneally "astutely aligns the imaginative content of historical fiction with the pert structure of the detective thriller, and by conflating them creates a new thing. "
Robert E. McDowell in World Literature Today concluded that "with Gossip from the Forest Keneally has succeeded better than in any of his previous books in lighting the lives of historical figures and in convincing us that people are really the events of history. "
In a favorable assessment in the New York Times Book Review, Robert Stone asserted that "Not since For Whom the Bell Tolls has a book of such sophistication, the work of a major international novelist, spoken out so unambiguously on behalf of an armed struggle. "
Writer Brian Bethune in Maclean's noted that "Shea's self-destructive nobility is at times maddening, yet Keneally's nuanced portrayal ultimately renders the character endearing. " According to David Willis McCullough in the New York Times Book Review, River Town is a "finely told novel. .. . fired with the passion and hidden poetry that only a sure and experienced novelist can bring to fiction. "
Reviewer Anthony Thwaite wrote in the New York Times Book Review that the novel blends "history, psychological insight and an epic adventure with great skill. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith echoes in the head long after it has been put down. "
Comparing Keneally's portrait of Joan with the religious presentation of her as saintly and with Bernard Shaw's humanizing dramatic rendering as earthy and pragmatic, Melvin Maddocks noted in Timethat Keneally "thoughtfully reconstructs a whole Joan, less spectacular than the first two but decidedly more convincing and perhaps, at last, more moving. "
Connections
Keneally married Judy Martin, then a nurse, in 1965, and they had two daughters, Margaret and Janet.