Showing results by author "Robert Hillman" in All Categories

Tom Hope doesn't chase rainbows. He does his best on the farm - he milks the cows, harvests the apples, looks after the sheep - but Tom's been lonely since Trudy left, taking little Peter with her to go join the holy rollers. Enter Hannah Babel, quixotic smalltown bookseller: the second Jew - and the most vivid person - Tom has ever met. When she asks him to help her build Australia's most beautiful bookshop, Tom dares to believe they could make each other happy. But it is 1968: 24 years since Hannah and her own little boy arrived at Auschwitz.

Welsey Cunningham grew up running barefoot through the orchards of his Quaker family farm, working with horses and dreaming of one day building himself a house on his own patch of ground above the river. The Second World War interrupted those dreams: it took Wes to New Guinea as a medic and then sent him home with healing bullet wounds in his legs. While Wes was away, life in Almond Tree continued but everyone's been changed by the war.

Stan 'Yarra' Yarramunua: artist, musician, actor, social worker, businessman. From growing up in poverty in Swan Hill - and sometimes on the road, with his itinerant father - Yarra had a tumultuous and often rough childhood. He learnt early how to lift a wallet or two and grew into a ratbag who looked set to follow in his father’s footsteps: fall into one too many skirmishes with the law; have one too many drinks, sliding down the path to alcoholism.

A story of courage, unconventionality and lust for life. Vera Wasowski was just seven years old when German soldiers marched her family into the Lvov Jewish ghetto in Poland. She watched her father take his own life and her mother accede to sexual blackmail in order to ensure her and Vera’s survival. With unsparing honesty and the blackest humour, she recalls a world where the desire to survive was everything.

An Afghan refugee’s extraordinary journey - from his early life as a shepherd boy in the mountains of Northern Afghanistan, to his forced exile after being captured and tortured by the Taliban, to incarceration in an Australian detention centre...and finally, to freedom. This moving and poignant work gives the listener a rare insight into the contented ‘milk and honey’ life of a simple Afghan family before the civil war ripped their country apart. The lives and centuries-old livelihood of farmers, craftsmen and small business owners were destroyed in just weeks and months.