Showing results by narrator "Paul English" in All Categories

The Roman poet Ovid, exiled to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea, tells the story of his meeting with a feral boy, brought up among wild animals in the snow. It is a luminous encounter between civilisation and nature. In the first century AD, Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverant poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, one of our most distinguished novelists has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving work of fiction.

Why do good things happen to bad people? Can we prove whether God exists? What is the difference between right and wrong? Medieval philosophers were centrally concerned with such questions, questions which are as relevant today as a thousand years ago when the likes of Anselm and Aquinas sought to resolve them. In this fast-paced and enlightening guide, Sharon M. Kaye takes us on a whistle-stop tour of medieval philosophy, revealing the debt it owes to Aristotle and Plato.

For three different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilisation rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men - sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.

Son of a Norwegian master-mariner and grandson of Kaloni, the last of the great Polynesian navigators, Gunnar Thorkild is a man consumed by a dream. Convinced that the Polynesians’ legendary Island of the Dead is real, he risks his career, his life – and those of his fellow adventurers – to find it. Shipwrecked on the very island they seek, the castaways are forced to leave behind everything they know and rely upon. To survive in this lush tropical paradise, they must make new laws of power and property, of sex and marriage.

Failed Shakespearean actor and would-be private detective William Power returns to Melbourne in this wry sequel that re-creates the tension and fear of wartime Australia. Bloodied and broken but somehow unbowed, he arrives in a town struggling under war-rationing and full of cocky American soldiers and lands squarely in the bosom of his childhood home in Carlton, now dominated by his sister-in-law, the odious Darlene.

Ned Kelly the man - warts and all - the most vivid portrait yet of Australia's immortal outlaw! Author, Ian Jones, acknowledged Kelly authority, shares with us the results of a lifetime's research. For the first time, Ned Kelly truly emerges as a man - a man who hated conflict yet never escaped it. A private man incapable of being ordinary and unnoticed. A man who was seen, even in his own lifetime, as what he represented rather than what he was.

Machiavelli has been among the most commented upon, criticized and feared thinkers of the modern world. Infamous for his support of brutality and repression as valid political instruments, he is often portrayed as the pantomime villain of political theorists. In this whirlwind tour of Machiavelli's writings and eventful life, Nederman highlights the complexities in his thought, showing that he actually advocated democracy as much as dictatorship, debate as much as violence.

A literary tour de force of power, guilt and obsession - two people stalk each other through the shadowy, tangled web of the past - man and woman caught in a dangerous game of confession, each partly predator and partly prey.... Nearly 20 years after Vita broke off contact with Royce, he writes to her, determined to excavate the past. He is older than her, a ghost from her university days, a former benefactor she has tried hard to forget.

In this last book of the trilogy, something has gone terribly wrong. Mel and his friends have been locked in Deep Trouble prison in the Mirrorscape, while their evil Mirrorshades - who look exactly like them - are free to cause havoc in Vlam. Luckily, their old friends Goldie and Pilfer are on hand to help them break out and try to prove their innocence.

In this audiobook you'll find what it takes to have an underlying sense of calm and equilibrium you can rely on the whole of your life. This is much more than feeling. It's a way of squeezing the most out of the up times, coping with the down times, and bouncing right back when things go completely off the rails. And best of all it requires no special skills and no effort. Calm: No Matter What shows you how to do this with one simple technique.

Fulfilling the dream of a lifetime, Melkin Womper is apprenticed to a master painter, Ambrosius Blenk. Son of a village weaver, Mel is overawed by the master's richly coloured and vividly detailed paintings. He is particularly amazed by the colours, because there are no colours back home. To have colour in your life, you have to buy the Pleasure, and the sinister scarlet-robed Fifth Mystery own the rights to such Pleasures.

Marr reveals a cleric at ease with power and aggressive in asserting the prerogatives of the Vatican. His account of Pell’s career focuses on his response as a man, a priest, an archbishop and prince of the church to the scandal that has engulfed the Catholic world in the last 30 years. This is the story of a cleric slow to see what was happening around him; torn by the contest between his church and its victims; and slow to realise that the Catholic Church cannot, in the end, escape secular scrutiny.

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 people under the enemy's cruel economic sanctions and portraying Great Uncle as their saviour.

Mel, Ludo and Wren are battling a new enemy - the sinister order of Ters, who have created storms over the city of Vlam. After a cry for help from a land in the Mirrorscape, the three friends go back into that strange and unpredictable world. They make new friends - and enemies - as they attempt to prevent the storms that threaten Vlam with a plague of demons.

On remote Rollrock Island, the sea-witch Misskaella discovers she can draw a girl from the heart of a seal. So, for a price, any man might buy himself a bride—an irresistibly enchanting sea-wife. But what cost will be borne by the people of Rollrock—the men, the women, the children—once Misskaella sets her heart on doing such a thing?

A tale of longing, loss and growing love under the bright Australian sun. It's 1921, and the Great War has left in its wake untold tragedy, not only in lives lost but in the guilt of survivors, the deep-set scars of old wounds and the sting of redoubled bigotries. In the tiny hamlet of Sunshine, on the far-flung desert's edge, three very different ex-servicemen - Jack Bell, an Aboriginal horseman; Snow McGlynn, a laconic, curmudgeonly farmer and Art Lovelee, an eccentric engineer - find themselves sharing a finger of farmland along the Darling River, and not much else.

Being the skipper of the cutter that carries all supplies and communications between Tasmania and Maria Island is a powerful position - and a deadly one. Monsarrat and Mrs Mulrooney are sent to Maria Island in January of 1826, the very early days of the penal settlement there, to solve the murder of Harefield - the man who sailed the government cutter between mainland Tasmania and Maria Island, bringing all supplies and correspondence and directives - all of which he made sure to read.

Not all murder victims are mourned, but the perpetrator must always be punished.... For Robert Church, superintendent of the Parramatta Female Factory, the most enjoyable part of his job is access to young convict women. Inmate Grace O'Leary has made it her mission to protect the women from his nocturnal visits, and when Church is murdered with an awl thrust through his right eye, she becomes the chief suspect.

George Pell: leader of the Catholic Church in Australia, confessor to Tony Abbott. David Marr: the nation's leading biographer and investigative journalist. Cardinal George Pell is the most prominent Catholic leader in Australia at a time when the Church's handling of sexual abuse is being closely investigated. He is also the confessor of prime-minister-in-waiting Tony Abbott.

Being the skipper of the cutter that carries all supplies and communications between Tasmania and Maria Island is a powerful position, and a deadly one. 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.