Showing results by narrator "John Derum" in All Categories

The war on drugs has been official American policy since the 1970s, with the UK, Europe, and much of the world following suit. It is at best a failed policy, according to best-selling author Antony Loewenstein. Its direct results have included mass incarceration in the US, extreme violence in different parts of the world, the backing of dictatorships, and surging drug addiction globally. And now the Trump administration is unleashing diplomatic and military forces against any softening of the conflict.

A powerful story of Australia's great sheep farms from one of our greatest writers. Gripped by Drought is a story of a man's battle not only with the elements of nature which threatened the ruin of his huge Australian sheep-farm, but also with a loveless and unhappy marriage. For Frank Mayne, master of well-nigh a million-acre sheep station, life assumed its most dreary aspect. No rain for his farm, a wife who involved him in an orgy of spending and entertainment and with disaster just round the corner, there seemed little prospect of happiness.

Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles – from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In The Great World, David Malouf gives a voice to that experience. But The Great World is more than a novel of war. Ranging over 70 years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming King's Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, it is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.