Winner of the 1968 Miles Franklin AwardFrom the moment he allows his young cousin and bride to spend the night in his room, Father Maitland causes raised eyebrows and dark mutterings amongst the brothers at St Peter's. Time and again his efforts to do the right thing for his fellow men lead him into conflict with his superiors and the immutable laws of the church - a conflict which ultimately threatens to destroy him both as a priest and as a man. Thomas Keneally's darkly satirical novel, which won him his second successive Miles Franklin Award resounds with intellect and humour.

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.

'I knew in general terms I was marrying a hero. The burden lay lightly on Leo, and to be a hero's wife in times supposedly suited to the heroic caused a woman to swallow doubt... The Japanese had barely been turned away. It was heresy and unlucky to undermine young men at such a supreme hour.' When Grace married the genial and handsome Captain Leo Waterhouse in Australia in 1943, they were young, in love - and at war. Like many other young men and women, they were ready, willing and able to put the war effort first. They never seriously doubted that they would come through unscathed. But Leo never returned from a commando mission masterminded by his own hero figure, an eccentric and charismatic man who inspired total loyalty from those under his command. The world moved on to new alliances, leaving Grace, like so many widows, to bear the pain of losing the love of her life and wonder what it had all been for. Sixty years on, Grace is still haunted by the tragedy of her doomed...

Artem Samsurov, a charismatic protege 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 emigres 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 almost as prevalent in Brisbane as at home. Yet he finds fellow spirits in a fiery old suffragette and a distractingly attractive married woman, who undermines his belief that a revolutionary cannot spare the time for relationships. When the revolution dawns and he returns to Russia, will his ideals hold true? Based on a true story, THE PEOPLE'S TRAIN brings the past alive and makes it resonate in the present. With all the empathy and storytelling skills that he brought to bear in...

This is the story of three great famines. The first is an Gorta Mór, 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...

The epic Australian novel that was inspired by a diary Tom Keneally discovered while researching The Great Shame.When Sydney film producer Dimp Bettany discovers the memoirs of her ancestors, John Bettany and Sarah Bernard, she is convinced she has found the vehicle for her next masterpiece. Filtered through Dimp's correspondence with her sister, Prim, an aid worker in the Sudan, we are drawn into the lives of John Bettany, a man far ahead of his time, as he shares his vivid impressions of a new colony, and his future wife Sarah, a former convict who has been interred in the notorious Female Factory and who has a close friendship with an English murderess.