検索キーワード： ナレーター "Paul English" すべてのカテゴリー

This is your one chance. You have your secret dreams. Follow them! Make them come true ...In a poor village in northern China, a small boy is about to be taken away from everything he's ever known. He is so afraid, but his mother urges him to follow his dreams. For soon he will become a dancer, one of the finest dancers in the world...So begins The Peasant Prince, the true story of Li Cunxin's extraordinary life.

One day, not so very many years ago, a small peasant boy was chosen to study ballet at the Beijing Dance Academy. His mother urged him to take this chance of a lifetime. But Li was only eleven years old and he was scared and lonely, pushed away from all that he had ever known and loved. He hated the strict training routines and the strange place he had been brought to. All he wanted to do was go home - to his mother, father, and six brothers, to his own small village. But soon Li realised that his mother was right. He had the chance to do something special with his life - and he never turned back.

Failed Shakespearean actor and would-be private detective William Power returns to Melbourne in this wry sequel that re-creates the tension and fear of wartime Australia. Bloodied and broken but somehow unbowed, he arrives in a town struggling under war-rationing and full of cocky American soldiers and lands squarely in the bosom of his childhood home in Carlton, now dominated by his sister-in-law, the odious Darlene.

It's 1942, and war is raging in Europe and in the Pacific. The Japanese army is on Australia's doorstep, and the small coastal Queensland town of Maryborough is on full war footing. What they are not prepared for is the arrival in the town of a troupe of incompetent actors whose unjustifiably self-confident leader, William Power, is determined to bring his daring production of Titus Andronicus to the barbarians of rural Australia. Unfortunately for the Power Players, the only gift William Power has is a capacity for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The role of the sailor through history should never be underestimated. Over centuries battles were won and new lands discovered and settled by their skills and nerve. Rob Mundle is back on the ocean to tell one of the great stories of an expedition under sail: the extraordinary eight-month, 17-000-nautical mile voyage of the First Fleet. With customary sweep and swell, Mundle puts you alongside 48-year-old Captain Arthur Phillip on the quarterdeck of the Royal Navy escort, HMS Sirius, as he commands his small armada of 11 ships, carrying over 1420 men, women and children, to the other side of the world.

Captain James Cook is one of the greatest maritime explorers of all time. Over three remarkable voyages of discovery into the Pacific in the latter part of the 18th century, Cook unravelled the oldest mystery surrounding the existence of Terra Australis Incognita - the Great South Land. He became the first explorer to circumnavigate New Zealand and establish that it was two main islands; discover the Hawaiian Islands for the British Empire; and left an enduring legacy. 

For three different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilisation rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men - sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.

For many, the colonial story of Australia starts with Captain Cook's discovery of the east coast in 1770, but it was some 164 years before his historic voyage that European mariners began their romance with the immensity of the Australian continent. Between 1606 and 1688, while the British had their hands full with the Gunpowder Plot and the English Civil War, it was highly skilled Dutch seafarers who discovered and mapped the majority of the vast, unknown waters and land masses in the Indian and Southern Oceans.

Thirteen-year-old Barnaby Fletch is a bag-and-bones orphan in London in the late 1700s.Barnaby lives on his wits and ill-gotten gains, on streets seething with the press of the throng and shadowed by sinister figures. Life is a precarious business.When he hears of a paradise on the other side of the world – a place called Botany Bay – he decides to commit a crime and get himself transported to a new life, a better life.

Never before has a member of the Packer family co-operated with a writer to tell their story. In his biography The Price of Fortune, one of the nation's richest and most psychoanalyzed men opens up in an attempt to make sense of his roller-coaster life and to tell the human story of being James Douglas Packer. Of how his wealth, charm and intellect took him to such exciting places. Yet how sometimes trusting the wrong people and his own rash actions cost him - and how he is now working on getting it all back.

Alice is a young woman living on her father-in-law's farm on the edge of an Australian country town while her husband is held prisoner in Europe. When Giancarlo, an Italian anarchist at the prisoner-of-war camp down the road, is assigned to work on the farm, she hopes that being kind to him will somehow influence her husband's treatment. What she doesn't anticipate is how dramatically Giancarlo will expand her outlook and self-knowledge.

Son of a Norwegian master-mariner and grandson of Kaloni, the last of the great Polynesian navigators, Gunnar Thorkild is a man consumed by a dream. Convinced that the Polynesians’ legendary Island of the Dead is real, he risks his career, his life – and those of his fellow adventurers – to find it. Shipwrecked on the very island they seek, the castaways are forced to leave behind everything they know and rely upon. To survive in this lush tropical paradise, they must make new laws of power and property, of sex and marriage.

The Sydney to Hobart yacht race is one of the world's major sporting events. In 1998, it became one of the world's major sporting disasters. Six sailors tragically perished, and numerous yachts sank or were badly damaged. the subsequent search and rescue operation was one of the most phenomenally accomplished peacetime efforts the world has ever seen. In this fully updated edition to mark the 10th anniversary of the tumultuous race, Rob Mundle, one of Australia's leading journalists and yachtsmen, tells this story of challenge and survival with compassion, vigour and understanding.

Marr reveals a cleric at ease with power and aggressive in asserting the prerogatives of the Vatican. His account of Pell’s career focuses on his response as a man, a priest, an archbishop and prince of the church to the scandal that has engulfed the Catholic world in the last 30 years. This is the story of a cleric slow to see what was happening around him; torn by the contest between his church and its victims; and slow to realise that the Catholic Church cannot, in the end, escape secular scrutiny. 

Being the skipper of the cutter that carries all supplies and communications between Tasmania and Maria Island is a powerful position, and a deadly one. In the third instalment of the Monsarrat series, Hugh Llewelyn Monsarrat and his trusty housekeeper, Mrs Mulrooney, are sent to remote Maria Island to solve the murder of Bart Harefield, the detested cutter skipper who was responsible for bringing supplies and correspondence to the island. Bart knew that knowledge was currency, and he wasn’t shy about reading the letters he brought across.

A tale of longing, loss and growing love under the bright Australian sun. It's 1921, and the Great War has left in its wake untold tragedy, not only in lives lost but in the guilt of survivors, the deep-set scars of old wounds and the sting of redoubled bigotries. In the tiny hamlet of Sunshine, on the far-flung desert's edge, three very different ex-servicemen - Jack Bell, an Aboriginal horseman; Snow McGlynn, a laconic, curmudgeonly farmer and Art Lovelee, an eccentric engineer - find themselves sharing a finger of farmland along the Darling River, and not much else. 

Jeff is dying. Haunted by memories and grappling with the shame of his desires, he runs away to remote Scotland with a piece of experimental tech that allows him to enter the mind of someone in the past. Instructed to use it only three times, Jeff - self-indulgent, isolated and deteriorating - ignores this advice.   

The Roman poet Ovid, exiled to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea, tells the story of his meeting with a feral boy, brought up among wild animals in the snow. It is a luminous encounter between civilisation and nature. In the first century AD, Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverant poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, one of our most distinguished novelists has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving work of fiction.

In the 1840s, a ship's boy, cast ashore in northern Australia, is taken in by Aborigines. 16 years later he steps out of the bush and inadvertently confronts the new white settlers with their unspoken terrors. A searing and magnificent picture of Australia at the time of its foundation, focusing on the hostility between early British settlers and native Aboriginals, Remembering Babylon tells the tragic and compelling story of a boy caught between both worlds - the civilised and the primitive. 

On remote Rollrock Island, the sea-witch Misskaella discovers she can draw a girl from the heart of a seal. So, for a price, any man might buy himself a bride—an irresistibly enchanting sea-wife. But what cost will be borne by the people of Rollrock—the men, the women, the children—once Misskaella sets her heart on doing such a thing?