Basket totals

Author

Tom Keneally

Thomas (Tom) Keneally was born in Sydney in 1935. Of Irish descent, he trained for several years for the Catholic priesthood but did not take orders. He worked as a school teacher, clerk and drama teacher. In the mid-1960s Keneally embarked on an extraordinary career as a writer, with remarkable success in Australia and overseas. He has won many prestigious literary awards. He won the Booker Prize in 1982 and has won the Miles Franklin Award twice.

Search Results

Title:

The People's Train

Written by:

Tom Keneally 

Read by:

David Tredinnick 

Format:

Unabridged CD Audio Book 

Number of CDs:

14 

Duration:

16 hours 55 minutes 

Published:

August 01 2009 

Available Date:

June 28 2011 

Age Category:

Adult 

ISBN:

9781742334363 

Genres:

Fiction; Australian Fiction; Historical Fiction 

Publisher:

Bolinda audio 

Qty

Format

Price

Bolinda price

AUD$ 49.95

AUD$ 49.95

**

 

Books Alive: 50 Books You Can't Put Down

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's Ark.

Artem Samsurov, a charismatic protégé of Lenin and an ardent socialist, reaches sanctuary in Australia after escaping his Siberian labour camp and making a long, perilous journey via Japan. But Brisbane in 1911 turns out not to be quite the workers' paradise he was expecting, or the bickering local Russian émigrés a model of brotherhood. As Artem helps organise a strike and gets dangerously entangled in the death of another exile, he discovers that corruption, repression and injustice are almost as prevalent in Brisbane as at home. Yet he finds fellow spirits in a fiery old suffragette and a distractingly attractive married woman, who undermines his belief that a revolutionary cannot spare the time for relationships. When the revolution dawns and he returns to Russia, will his ideals hold true?

"Keneally’s historical novel is neatly broken in two, a structure that requires David Tredinnick to give voice to two distinct narrators. In the first half, Artem Samsurov, a Bolshevik escapee from Tsarist Russia and an intimate of Lenin, makes his way to Brisbane. There he embroils himself in the Australian labor movement, which is undone in the patriotic fervor of WWI. In the second half, Paddy Dykes, an Australian working-class journalist, accompanies his friend Samsurov back to Russia in time to witness firsthand the momentous events of October 1917. Tredinnick undertakes a convincing and enchanting Russian accent for the Samsurov section and an equally companionable Australian accent for Dykes. The voices are quite different,yet Tredinnick portrays characteristics that both men have in common: enormous zest, decency, and idealism transplanted to foreign shores."
AudioFile Magazine