In this fascinating history of two turbulent centuries in an apparently idyllic place, Shakespeare effortlessly weaves the history of this unique island with a kaleidoscope of stories featuring a cast of unlikely characters from Errol Flynn to the King of Icel&, a village full of Chatwins &, inevitably, a family of Shakespeares. But what makes this more than a personal quest is Shakespeare's discovery that, despite the nineteen century purges, the Tasmanian Aborigines were not, as previously believed, entirely wiped out. ...

'I am sixteen. I am as old as the century' It is 1916. Vincent is sixteen, on the brink of manhood. Vincent is aristocratic & privileged, frequenting the salons of Paris while France is at war & the city almost deserted of men. In that brutal summer, Vincent's beauty & precocity captivate two men: Marcel, some thirty years his senior, a writer & celebrated socialite; & Arthur, the twenty-one year old son of one of the servants, who is now a soldier at the front. Both relationships become love affairs of a kind
- of the mind or of the body. Vincent intuitively tries to keep his passions separate, but over the weeks of indolent Parisian summer & far-off war, confidences are made, absences endured, secrets revealed. All of these men will suffer, & Vincent will lose the last vestiges of his childhood innocence. In the Absence of Men is a stunning first novel: in its daring in representing Marcel Proust as a character, in the beauty of its prose & in its delicacy of feeling. It is a quite remarkable debut.
...

The foundation stone of Jewish & Christian scriptures, the power of the Book of Genesis lies in its stories
- Creation, the Fall,
...

In the autumn of 1993, American special forces were dispatched to the famine-stricken land of Somalia. Their intervention in this war-torn country was the most dramatic US military action since Vietnam. A routine mission went horribly wrong when Michael Durant ...