AustLit

'Award-winning Australian author Peter Thompson evokes the now-vanished world he encountered on joining ‘Cudlipp’s Circus’ at the Daily Mirror in 1966, bringing to life the days when Fleet Street was the front-page equivalent of Dodge City and its pubs shuddered to the midnight roar of mighty rotary presses. The Mirror’s daily quota of mischief, mayhem and madness attracted journalists from all over the globe. The columnist Cassandra called this convergence of talent ‘Cudlipp’s Circus’ after its ringmaster, the great tabloid editor Hugh Cudlipp

'The author was night editor and deputy editor of the Daily Mirror, editor of the Sunday Mirror and a director of Mirror Group Newspapers. He describes the Mirror scene in its heyday from the baroque splendour of the chairman’s office to its fabled pub, the Stab in the Back, and tells the inside story of the paper’s great scoops, love affairs, vanities and vendettas.

'But Cudlipp’s Circus is much more than a classic tale of newspaper life appealing to journalists and the general reader everywhere. Written in the age of the Leveson inquiry following public revulsion over the News of the World’s hacking of the mobile phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, it examines the acquisition of press power and its abuse through the lives of the four newspaper barons for whom the author worked: Cecil King, Hugh Cudlipp, Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch.

'Drawing on his extensive archive of documents, diaries and interviews with many of the great names in post-war journalism, Thompson has written an explosive memoir of extraordinary power, depth and perception, encompassing his experiences in the Australian media in the early Sixties and moving to London for the epic battle between the Daily Mirror and The Sun - a blood feud that came to symbolize the decline and fall of Fleet Street itself.' (Publication summary)

It's 1964 when a crazed arsonist begins torching the once tranquil Hamilton Valley in NSW Australia.

'Night after night the wail of sirens wake the locals from their sleep.

'Little did they realise, this rampage would last for close on four years!

'The detectives have their eye on several persons of interest, then they discover the method the lunatic is using to light the fires! Clever indeed!

'Father Damien the priest from the local seminary has a penchant for lurking around watching the aftermath of the fires...

'Grandma Emmie, the keeper of family secrets holds the key to the reason a newcomer has arrived in the valley. She has to make a decision to reveal the truth for everyone concerned.

'Beautiful Ellie becomes tangled in a shocking web of lust, it has dire consequences...

'The Christmas Eve fire looks like it may destroy the valley...will this maniac ever be stopped?

'Evil has entered Hamilton Valley in more ways than one...RED HOT...chilling, tantalising, erotic and emotional.

'A vividly written story based on true events.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (BWM edition).

'Insightful, humorous and confronting, “Crucible” is a delicate portrait of the thoughts and emotions of a young man experiencing a brutal and bewildering war. This prize-winning Australian novel of the First World War recounts the coming of age of a sensitive young Australian soldier on the Western Front. McKinney, whose portrait appears on the book’s cover, fought in France from 1915 to1918 with the First Anzac Cyclist Battalion, and much of the novel is loosely based on his own wartime experiences. It takes the reader to the trenches and their horrors, as well as to life behind the lines in occupied France. The camaraderie, intense friendships and occasional tensions among the Diggers who lived and died together in France is vividly portrayed, and young John Fairbairn finds himself faced with the painful dilemmas of love and betrayal that war so often brings in its train. “Crucible” broke new ground in its use of a narrative technique that slips between traditional third person narration and the immediacy of a sometimes fragmented and intense inner voice. It won the RSL Prize for an Australian War Novel in 1935, the year it was published.' (Publication summary)

'Young men assumed that the Grim Reaper would harvest their seniors long before their own turn came. Captain Paul Schluter knew better. During his long seafaring career there had been occasions when the Reaper had swung his scythe indiscriminately, cutting down the young with the old. Yet Schluter had volunteered to navigate in a suicidal air race to Hawaii – and he had never flown before. He declared: 'I'll go for the glory!'

'Other glory-seekers included Hollywood movie stars, newspaper reporters, elderly ladies, boy scouts, and a young schoolteacher.

'The pilots were among the world’s most illustrious aviators and the names of their financial backers read like a Who’s Who of big business - but all the aircraft in the race were experimental. And one was still being constructed at the starting line, only hours before the race.

'President Calvin Coolidge was warned that it was not a sporting contest. It was a catastrophe about to happen. Lloyds of London classified it - "an uninsurable risk". But no one could stop it. The US Pacific Fleet made ready for a massive search and rescue operation…

'This amazing story is a factual account of aviation in the Roaring Twenties when Lindberg Fever gripped America. Other books have been written about it, but this is the definitive one. It is a brilliantly researched and forensic study of how the aircraft were constructed, the motivation of the financiers and the politicians - and of the aviators' bravery and folly. ' (Publication abstract)

'Based upon the diaries of Mrs. Mowle that cover the periods of her life in the area that became Braidwood, the Southern Alps, the plains of Canberra and the south coast of N.S.W. Illustrated with historical photos and sketches. Content well supported by extensive notes, bibliography and index.' (Source: Goodreads website)