AustLit

'London, 1855. While Great Britain is at war with the Russians in the Crimea, a cadre of disaffected seditionists and insurrectionists, made up of members of the aristocracy and wealthy industrialists, have set a plan into action that’s been decades in the making—a plan that aims to overthrow the Queen and to install a puppet king on the throne in her place. With the war raging and disquiet in the industrial north and in Ireland, their perfidious plot, unless stopped, threatens to bring about anarchy and revolution.

'Aware of the imminent danger, Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, has tasked The Brothers, a band of four men, friends of over twenty years, to root out the source of the infection, destroy the clique, and track down and eradicate its foreign pretender by any means necessary. From molly houses to state banquets, from hospitals to steam baths, from aristocratic households to the meanest of slums, the friends find themselves in a succession of increasingly perilous situations.

'Like the mighty Thames, undercurrents flow swift and deep as they uncover plot after plot and treachery and treason in abundance.' (Publication summary)

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'"Six deaths, if we include his, my father's, and Fabrice's, Andy," I whispered. "All because of a simple, insignificant error of judgement--Fabrice Evans just gave the wrong address to a madman."

'A wrongly delivered letter sparks a chain of events that threaten the life of Edward Murray, "Australia's Son", the most renowned operatic baritone of his day.

'It is 1902, and Edward has just returned to the Metropole Hotel after a performance of La Boheme at the Theatre Royal in Sydney, when the manager phones his apartment to tell him the police have arrived with bad news.

'Edward, and his vaudeville performer brother, Theodore, are shocked to hear that Edward's dresser, the brothers' oldest friend from childhood, has been found dead, stabbed in the back, in Edward's recently vacated dressing room.

'Following a sequence of gruesome killings, Edward and the detective assigned to protect him, Chief Constable Andrew Bolton, are lured into a trap by a man whose agenda is not only personal, but driven by a deranged mind.

'The silver lining for Edward during these grisly events is the smell of tar and honey, and the promise of a special friendship with the man tasked with keeping him out of harm's way.

'Set around the theatre world of early Edwardian Sydney, the story is steeped in the world of class divides, of music and the theatre, and what it was to be a performer at the turn of the twentieth century. Its themes of murder, treachery and foul play, are ofttimes confronting, but the story is linked throughout by Edward Murray, the man with the golden voice, whose overarching belief is that even in the darkest of times, a sliver of light can mean that hope is at hand.' (Publication summary)

'The Boys of Bullaroo is a collection of six short stories, each set a decade apart, spanning the period from the Great War to the Vietnam conflict.

'Linked by an outback Australian town, Bullaroo, the narratives follow the loves, the losses, and the sexual awakenings of men over the course of sixty years.

'From the deserts of Egypt and the Light Horse, to prisoner of war camps during the Second World War, and to the flood of American servicemen on R during the age of conscription in the 1960s, these tales explore the nature of what it is to love, and to be loved by other men.

Razor gangs, male prostitution, and the immediate post-war flood of emigrants from southern Europe are some of the themes that contribute to the colour and private lives of husbands, brothers, sons, and lovers over the course of the century, told from a unique, Australian perspective.' (Publication summary)