You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. 'Any of Frank Moorhouse's books are rewarding and stimulating. But his trilogy following a young Australian diplomat at the founding of the League of Nations is a masterpiece. In Edith Campbell Berry, his heroine, he created one of the enduring characters in literature. The trilogy is Grand Days, Dark Palace and Cold Light. All are must reads.' - Michael Williams, Qantas magazine Five years have passed since Edith Campbell Berry's triumphant arrival at the League of Nations in Geneva, determined to right the wrongs of the world. The idealism of those early Grand Days has been eroded by a sense foreboding as the world moves ever closer to another w...
Winner of the Queensland Literary Award. Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the Barbara Jefferis Prize. 'Any of Frank Moorhouse's books are rewarding and stimulating. But his trilogy following a young Australian diplomat at the founding of the League of Nations is a masterpiece. In Edith Campbell Berry, his heroine, he created one of the enduring characters in literature. The trilogy is Grand Days, Dark Palace and Cold Light. All are must reads.' - Michael Williams, Qantas magazine It is 1950, the League of Nations has collapsed and the newly formed United Nations has rejected all those who worked and fought for the League. Edith Campbell Berry, who joined the League in Geneva befo...
'Any of Frank Moorhouse's books are rewarding and stimulating. But his trilogy following a young Australian diplomat at the founding of the League of Nations is a masterpiece. In Edith Campbell Berry, his heroine, he created one of the enduring characters in literature. The trilogy is Grand Days, Dark Palace and Cold Light. All are must reads.' - Michael Williams, Qantas magazine On a train from Paris to Geneva, Edith Campbell Berry meets Major Ambrose Westwood in the dining car, makes his acquaintance over a lunch of six courses, and allows him to kiss her passionately.Their early intimacy binds them together once they reach Geneva and their posts at the newly created League of Nations. There, a heady idealism prevails over Edith and her young colleagues, and nothing seems beyond their grasp, certainly not world peace. The exuberance of the times carries over into Geneva nights: Edith is drawn into a dark and glamorous underworld where, coaxed by Ambrose, she becomes more and more sexually adventurous. Reading Grand Days is a rare experience: it is vivid and wise, full of shocks of recognition and revelation. The final effect of the book is intoxicating and unplaceably original.
On a train from Paris to Geneva, Edith Campbell Berry meets Major Ambrose Westwood in the dining car, makes his acquaintance over a lunch of six courses, and allows him to kiss her passionately.Their early intimacy binds them together once they reach Geneva and their posts at the newly created League of Nations. There, a heady idealism prevails over Edith and her young colleagues, and nothing seems beyond their grasp, certainly not world peace. The exuberance of the times carries over into Geneva nights: Edith is drawn into a dark and glamorous underworld where, coaxed by Ambrose, she becomes more and more sexually adventurous.Reading GRAND DAYS is a rare experience: it is vivid and wise, full of shocks of recognition and revelation. The final effect of the book is intoxicating and unplaceably original.
A book of comic writing that incisively dissects our contemporary new sensitivities. How our Hero came to be a cultural ambassador in France fell into strange company; how he encountered the Duc and his entourage; how Europe responded to his Australian ways; how refinement eluded him; how the queen of commas almost brought him down by tugging his rope; how he became an honoured member of the Montaigne Clinic for civilised disorders; and how he began to discover the good life and how to get it when disaster struck. As Australia turns to Asia, Moorhouse's hero is permitted one last look at Europe. Loose Living is his dispatches home, detailing his arrival in the wondrously civilised world of France; his glittering life at the chateau with the Duc; his fall into disgrace at the Ecole des Beaux Arts Perdus; and his appointment as Gregarious Fellow at the Montaigne Clinic for Civilised disorders, deep in the Pyrenees. Incorporating Cuisine Cruelle compiled by Chef Bilson and the Duc.
What could he tell her now, now that he was forty and she was no longer 17? He is a failed writer turned diplomat, an anarchist learning the value of discipline. He moves in a world which takes him from the Australian wilderness to the conference rooms of Vienna and Geneva; from the whore-house to warzone he feels the pull of the genetic spiral of his ancestry. At the sharp axis of his mid-life he scans the memorabilia of his feelings in the hope of giving answers. In his first full-length novel Moorhouse presents a roving, dissatisfied man entering middle age in a house-of-mirrors portrait- fragmentary and multifaceted. Sean, a hard-drinking, hard-living Australian, has just turned 40; the ...
In 1954, two-year-old Samilya was abandoned by her migrant parents and placed in St Joseph's Home, known as Neerkol Orphanage, outside of Rockhampton. After suffering years of insidious abuse at the hands of the Catholic nuns and priests, at age 10, Samilya is returned to her mother's care where the trauma continued.
Acclaimed author Frank Moorhouse considers the world's most elegant and mysterious cocktail whilst also reflecting on his life. At once a celebration of the most elegant, arcane and mysterious cocktail of them all - the martini - and a lyrical memoir of friendship and love won and lost, Martini: A Memoir is Frank Moorhouse at his melancholy and hilarious best. As he muses on the aesthetics of martini lore - olive or twist, shaken or stirred, Dorothy Parker or James Bond? - and the nature of drinking, Moorhouse reflects on the role of the martini in his own life in prose as dry and intoxicating as the martini itself. With an Afterword.
Since Henry Lawson wrote his story 'The Drover’s Wife' in 1892, Australian writers, painters, performers and photographers have created a wonderful tradition of drover's wife works, stories and images. The Russell Drysdale painting from 1945 extended the mythology and it, too, has become an Australian icon. Other versions of the Lawson story have been written by Murray Bail, Barbara Jefferis, Mandy Sayer, David Ireland, Madeleine Watts and others, up to the present, including Leah Purcell's play and Ryan O’Neill’s graphic novel. In essays and commentary, Frank Moorhouse examines our ongoing fascination with this story and has collected some of the best pieces of writing on the subject. This remarkable, gorgeous book is, he writes, 'a monument to the drovers' wives'.
In 2013, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) made new efforts to extend its surveillance powers to internet and mobile phone communication and some other extensions of its powers, including the making the issuing of warrants easier. We are just beginning to evolve new attitudes and behavior appropriate for a society in which nothing can be assumed to be private, especially at the governmental level. At the same time, we are trying to discern what it is that constitutes, or not, an offence against national security. We are also facing the question of what degree of terrorist threat we are prepared to endure so as to retain freedoms of expression and what might be loosely ...