Humphrey Bower has narrated 40 audiobooks on Listento.it by 24 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 1,401 ratings. The most-rated is Shantaram.
The Family Frying Pan
Summary
Mrs. Moses is a small woman with a big heart and enormous courage. The only survivor of a Cossack raid on her village, she takes with her a big cast-iron frying pan, so heavy that she can only sling it over her back. Yet this is no ordinary frying pan, it's The Family Frying Pan, blessed with a Russian soul. From this frying pan Mrs. Moses manages to feed the various refugees who are travelling with her across Russia to freedom. In return, each of the group must tell a story around the campfire at night, stories of compassion and bravery, of human frailty and, above all, of hope.
©2013 Christine Courtenay; 2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty. Ltd
A Shorter History of Australia
Summary
After a lifetime of research and debate on Australian and international history, Geoffrey Blainey is well-placed to introduce us to the people who have played a part and to guide us through the events which have created the Australian identity: the mania for spectator sport, the suspicion of the tall poppy, the rivalries of Catholic and Protestant, Sydney and Melbourne, new and old homelands, the conflicts of war abroad and race at home, the importance of technology, the recognition of our Aboriginal past and Native Title, the successes and failures of the nation. For this enlarged edition, Blainey has rewritten or expanded on various episodes and themes, making changes to almost every page. He has described significant events and trends of the early-20th century. A final chapter summarises key factors that shaped and still shape this country's history.
©2009 Geoffrey Blainey (P)2010 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Silent Valley
Summary
Please note: Silent Valley has also been published under the alternate title Blessed Are the Dead.
A remote town. A girl of rare and exquisite beauty. A murder that silences a whole community.
The body of a 17-year-old girl has been found covered in wildflowers on a hillside in the Drakensberg Mountains, near Durban. She is the daughter of a Zulu chief, destined to fetch a high bride price. Was Amahle as innocent as her family claims, or is her murder a sign that she lived a secret life?
Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper is sent to investigate. He must enter the guarded worlds of a traditional Zulu clan and a white farming community to gather up the clues Amahle left behind and bring her murderer to justice. But the silence in the valley is deafening, and it seems that everyone - from the uncooperative local police officer, to the white farm boy who seems obsessed with the dead girl - has something to hide.
With no cause of death and no motive, Cooper's investigation is blocked at each turn. Can he tough it out, or will the small-town politics that stir up his feelings about the past be more than he can bear?
In this pause-resisting tale of murder and mystery, Nunn entangles us in a rich and complex web of witchcraft, tribalism, taboo relationships...and plain old-fashioned greed.
©2012 Malla Nunn (P)2012 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Tobruk
Summary
In the early days of April 1941, the 14,000 Australian forces garrisoned in the Libyan town of Tobruk were told to expect reinforcements and supplies within eight weeks. Eight months later these heroic, gallant, determined "Rats of Tobruk" were rescued by the British Navy having held the fort against the might of Rommel's never-before-defeated Afrika Corps.
Like Gallipoli and Kokoda, the siege of Tobruk is an iconic battle in Australia's military history. Under ceaseless attack from Rommel's men, the Australian defense held strong. In Tobruk, Peter FitzSimons relates the personal histories and stories not only of the men who defended the garrison against the German onslaught but of the Desert Fox, Erwin Rommel, and the powers back in both Berlin and Britain.
©2006 Peter FitzSimons (P)2007 Bolinda Publishers Pty Ltd.
Matthew Flinder's Cat
Summary
The story of a drunk, a boy, and a cat. Billy O'Shannessy, once a prominent barrister, is now on the street where he sleeps on a bench outside the State Library. Above him on the window sill rests a bronze statue of Matthew Flinders' cat, Trim. Ryan is a 10-year-old, a near-street kid heading for the usual trouble. The two form an unlikely bond. Through telling Ryan the story of Flinders' circumnavigation of Australia as seen through Trim's eyes, Billy is drawn deeply into Ryan's life and into the Sydney underworld.
©2013 Christine Courtenay (P)2014 Publishing Pty. Ltd
The Man Who Knew Infinity
Summary
In 1913, a young, unschooled Indian clerk wrote a letter to G. H. Hardy, begging that preeminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers. Hardy, realizing the letter was the work of a genius, arranged for Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England. Thus began one of the most remarkable collaborations ever chronicled. With a passion for rich and evocative detail, Robert Kanigel takes us from the temples and teeming slums of Madras to the courts and chapels of Cambridge University, where the devout Hindu Ramanujan, "the Prince of Intuition", tested his brilliant theories alongside the sophisticated and eccentric Hardy, "the Apostle of Proof". In time, Ramanujan's creative intensity took its toll: he died at the age of 32, but left behind a magical and inspired legacy that today is still being plumbed for its secrets.
©1991 Robert Kanigel (P)2007 Blackstone Audio Inc.
The Sound of One Hand Clapping
Summary
Winner of the Australian Bookseller's Choice Award, this is a modern Australian classic set in Tasmania.
In 1954, in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam in the remote Tasmanian highlands, Bojan Buloh had brought his family to start a new life away from Slovenia, the privations of war, and refugee settlements. One night, Bojan's wife walked off into a blizzard, never to return - leaving Bojan to drink too much to quiet his ghosts, and to care for his three-year-old daughter, Sonja, alone.
Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to Tasmania and a father haunted by memories of the European war and other, more recent horrors. As the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, Sonja's empty life and her father's living death are to change forever.
©1997 Richard Flanagan (P)2012 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Parrot and Olivier in America
Summary
Olivier, an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. Born on different sides of history, their lives will be joined by an enigmatic one-armed marquis.When Olivier sets sail for the nascent United States, ostensibly to make a study of the penal system but more precisely to save his neck from one more revolution, Parrot will be there, too, as spy for the marquis and as protector, foe, and foil for Olivier.As the narrative shifts between Parrot and Olivier—their adventures in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands—a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold. And with their story, Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy with dazzling inventiveness.
©2010 Peter Carey (P)2009 Bolinda Publishing Proprietary Liimited; 2010 by Blackstone Audio, Inc.
How to Have a Beautiful Mind
Summary
From the international best-selling author of Lateral Thinking and Six Thinking Hats. Use the power of creative thinking to become more attractive with a makeover for your mind! It doesn't take a high IQ, or reams of knowledge, or a great personality. All it takes is creativity, imagination, and empathy - all techniques that anyone can learn. Here Edward de Bono, world-famous for changing the way people think, shows you in clear, practical language how to impress people with simple conversational tactics. Want to be irresistible? Then follow de Bono's advice: you won't believe how much it can revolutionize your life until you do.
©2004 Edward de Bono (P)2009 Bolinda Publishing
In My Father's Den
Summary
Major feature film adaptation stars Matthew McFadyen, Miranda Otto and Emily Barclay. Narrated by Audie-Award winner and 2007 finalist, Humphrey Bower. Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand's best-known writers and is winner of the Wattie Award (twice), the Montana Award, and the New Zealand Fiction Award (four times). When Celia Inverarity, aged 17, is found brutally murdered in a secluded West Auckland park one Sunday afternoon, Paul Prior, her English teacher and mentor, is suspected of being her murderer. Celia's death and the violence which follows send Prior back to examine the past - a past that is as secret as his father's den in the old poison shed. Eventually the murderer is exposed, but not before a family has been split apart and old wounds revealed.
©1972 Maurice Gee (P)2007 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
In the Memorial Room
Summary
In the Memorial Room is a brilliant black comedy by the celebrated author of An Angel at My Table. Harry Gill, a moderately successful writer of historical fiction, has been awarded the annual Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship - a 'living memorial' to the poet Margaret Rose Hurndell. He arrives in the small French village of Menton, where Hurndell once lived and worked, to write. But the Memorial Room is not suitable - it has no electricity or water. Hurndell never wrote here, though it is expected of Harry. Janet Frame's previously unpublished novel draws on her own experiences in Menton, France, as a Katherine Mansfield Fellow. It is a wonderful social satire, a send-up of the cult of the dead author, and - in the best tradition of Frame - a fascinating exploration of the complexity and the beauty of language.
©2017 Janet Frame Literary Trust (P)2017 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
The Unknown Terrorist
Summary
An extraordinary achievement,
The Unknown Terrorist is chilling, impossible to put down, and all too familiar.
What would you do if you turned on the television and saw you were the most wanted terrorist in Australia? Gina Davies is about to find out.
From the author of the international bestsellers The Sound of One Hand Clapping and Gould's Book of Fish comes a fast-paced thriller that paints a devastating picture of contemporary Australia.
Five days, three unexploded bombs, and every truth of your life turned into a lie. What would you do?
©2007 Richard Flanagan (P)2007 Bolinda Publishing
The Holy City
Summary
Now entering his 67th year, Chris McCool can confidently call himself a member of the Happy Club: he has an attractive and exceedingly accommodating Croatian girlfriend and has been told he bears more than a passing resemblance to Roger Moore. As he looks back on the glory days of his youth, he recalls the swinging 60s of rural Ireland: a decade in which the cool cats sang along to Lulu and drove around in Ford Cortinas, when swinging meant wearing velvet trousers and shirts with frills, and where Dolores McCausland - Dolly Mixtures to those who knew her best - danced on the tops of tables and set the pulses of every man in small-town Cullymore racing. Chris McCool had it all back then. He had the moves, he had the car, and he had Dolly, a woman who purred suggestive songs and tugged gently at her skin-tight dresses, a Protestant femme fatale who was glamorous, transgressive, and who called him her very own 'Mr Wonderful'. She was, in short, the answer to this bastard son of a Catholic farmer's prayers. Except that there was another Mr Wonderful in town, a certain Marcus Otoyo - a young Nigerian with glossy curls and a dazzling devoutness that was all but irresistible. Although Chris, of course, was interested in Marcus only because of their shared religious fervour and mutual appreciation of the finer things. That was all. Besides, Mr McCool was always a hopeless romantic - some even described him as excessively so - but is there anything wrong with that?
©2010 Patrick McCabe (P)2010 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
How to Have a Beautiful Mind
Summary
Use the power of creative thinking to become more attractive with a makeover of your mind! It doesn't need a high IQ, or reams of knowledge, or a great personality. All it needs is creativity, imagination and empathy - all techniques that anyone can learn. Here Edward de Bono, world-famous for changing the way people think, shows you in a clear, practical language how to impress people with simple conversational tactics. Want to be irresistable? Then follow de Bono's advice: you won't believe how much it can revolutionise your life until you do.
©2004 Edward De Bono (P)2004 The McQuaig Group Ltd and Bolinda Audio
American Scoundrel
Summary
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 while his wife stayed at home; as minister to Spain, he began an affair with the Queen while courting one of her ladies in waiting; and in his later years, he installed his housekeeper as his mistress while his second wife took up residence nearby. The brio with which Thomas Keneally tells the tale is equal to the pace and bravado of Sickles' life. But, more than this, American Scoundrel is the lens through which the listener can view history at a time when America was being torn apart.
©2002 The Serpentine Publishing Co (Pty) Ltd (P)2004 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Cape Grimm
Summary
On the far northwest coast of Tasmania at Cape Grimm lies the isolated and idiosyncratic community of Skye, which practices a religion that reveres the imagination. One clear evening all the inhabitants enter the church hall, where they are locked in and burned alive. They have been persuaded to do this by a young man called Caleb Mean, also known as El Nino, the Christ Child. How could such a thing happen? And why? Are the secrets in the history of Skye itself? Or do they lie within the mysteries of the human soul?
©2004 Carmel Bird (P)2004 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Rhubarb
Summary
A poignant and tender sort-of-love story about two damaged people tenuously connecting.Eleanor is blind and lives with her reclusive mother. Ewan is a cello player with agoraphobia. She is drawn to him through his music but cannot understand the difficulty he faces in forming a friendship. He does not understand her past, nor the impact his music has on her. Amidst the heat of a Fremantle summer, they stumble towards each other.Sad, funny, affecting, and peopled with characters that live and breathe, Rhubarb is the first novel from a young writer with an astonishing talent. With his sublime and playful use of language and his uncanny ability to reveal the human condition in all its vulnerability and fragility, Craig Silvey has created an extraordinary contemporary story.
©2004 Craig Silvey (P)2007 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet
Summary
Boost your health and vitality while losing weight. This special audio edition reinforces the principles of Australia's number-one diet book and incorporates updated information from Book Two. How many diets have you tried that haven't worked for you? The Total Wellbeing Diet, developed by Australia's CSIRO (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), is not just another diet; it's a long-term healthy eating plan that can make you feel great. This special audio edition offers an introduction and understanding of the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet, as well as a section on maintaining your new low weight and healthy lifestyle. It's the perfect companion to the print edition of this best-selling diet book, and can be used while you exercise or travel.
©2005 CSIRO (P)2006 Bolinda Publishers Pty Ltd.
Dead Europe
Summary
Isaac, a young Australian photographer, is travelling through Europe. His whole life he has longed for the sophistication and wealth of the Europe of his father’s stories, the Europe at the centre of civilisation and culture. But behind the facade of a unified and globalised contemporary society, he finds a history blasted wasteland, a place forever condemned by the ghosts of its unspeakable past. Dead Europe is an unsettling ghost story about blood lust, blood libel, and blood revenge.
©2005 Christos Tsiolkas (P)2011 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Pennies for Hitler
Summary
It's 1939, and for Georg, son of an English academic living in Germany, life is full of cream cakes and loving parents. It is also a time when his teacher measures the pupils' heads to see which of them have the most 'Aryan'- shaped heads. But when a university graduation ceremony turns into a pro-Nazi demonstration, Georg is smuggled out of Germany to war-torn London and then across enemy seas to Australia where he must forget his past and who he is in order to survive. Hatred is contagious, but Georg finds that kindness can be, too. The companion piece to Hitler's Daughter, Pennies for Hitler examines the life of a child during World War II, from a different perspective.
©2012 Copyright © Jackie French 2012 (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd