Frank Carlson Library

The past returns to haunt a guilt-stricken man who survived a tragic Antarctic expedition decades earlier in this powerful and thought-provoking novel from the author of Schindler's List A professor at an Australian university, Alec Ramsey has lived an eventful life, much of which he is reluctant to discuss. In the 1920s, he was a member of a small expedition to Antarctica that resulted in the tragic death of its leader and Ramsey's dear friend, Stephen...

A young Catholic priest, Father Maitland raises eyebrows among the brothers of St. Peter's the moment his young cousin and new bride spend the night in his room. But even when he's trying to do the right thing, Father Maitland continuously finds himself at odds with his superiors and the strictures of the Church-a conflict that threatens to unravel his faith and his life. A fastidious and darkly satirical novel, with moments of warm humor, Three...

A tormented and humiliated mixed-race Australian man reaches his breaking point and takes terrifying revenge on his abusers in this critically acclaimed novel based on actual events In Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, Jimmie Blacksmith is desperate to figure out where he belongs. Half-Anglo and half-Aboriginal, he feels out of place in both cultures. Schooled in the ways of white society by a Protestant missionary, Jimmie forsakes tribal...

Artem Samsurov, an ardent follower of Lenin and a hero of the rebellion, flees his Siberian labor camp for the sanctuary of Brisbane, Australia in 1911. Failing to find the worker's paradise and brotherhood he imagined, Artem quickly joins the agitation for a general strike among the growing trade union movement. He finds a fellow spirit in a dangerously attractive female lawyer and becomes entangled in the death of another Tsarist exile. But, Atrem...

A gripping reimagining of the drama, ego, intrigue, and madness at work during the World War I armistice negotiations In November 1918, after four long years of murderous conflict, six men gather in a railroad car in a secluded forest outside Paris, France, to negotiate an end to World War I. A pacifist, left-leaning diplomat with no military knowledge or experience, Matthias Erzberger has been selected by the German high command to represent their...

A disturbing love story about two families and the madness that threatens to consume them . . . Terry Delaney, a professional rugby player, leads a comfortable life with a genial wife and the occasional freelance job until he meets Danielle Kabbel. Obsessed and in love, Terry drops everything to pursue her. But it's her father Rudi Kabbel, an Eastern European immigrant with apocalyptic visions, and his madness that threatens to destroy Terry's sense...

In this playful and poignant memoir, Thomas Keneally returns to his adolescence in the suburbs of Sydney in 1952. At sixteen, the red-haired teenager idolized the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and had aspirations of becoming a star on the track or rugby field. He also dreamed of wooing the beautiful and alluring Bernadette Curran until the day she announces her desire to become a nun. For the first time, Keneally started to consider priesthood himself....

When Grace married the handsome and worldly Captain Leo Waterhouse in Australia during the middle of the Second World War, she never doubted that she had married a hero and he would come back to her unscathed. But Leo never returns from a commando raid on Japanese ships in the Singapore Harbour, leaving Grace a widow, like so many, to shoulder the pain and regret of losing her husband. Sixty years later, Grace is still bitter and perplexed by the...