Description
A typhus-ridden convict ship, a hurricane off Cape Horn, and the most harrowing voyage in all of nautical fiction. Desolation Island — the fifth Aubrey–Maturin novel, published in 1978 — sends Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin to the ends of the earth: escorting convicts to Australia aboard the decrepit Leopard, through plague below decks, mutiny simmering among the crew, and one of literature’s great storm sequences.
O’Brian piles catastrophe upon catastrophe — disease, a vengeful Dutch ship-of-the-line in pursuit, the infamous Cape Horn passage in all its terror — yet never loses the human thread. Jack faces disgrace and the fight for redemption, Stephen confronts grief and tests his resolve as physician and spy, and the friendship that holds them together deepens under impossible pressure. The iceberg chapters are heart-stopping: survival writing of the highest order.
Fifth in the twenty-one-volume sequence — read in order for the full emotional arc. For adventure readers and O’Brian devotees alike, this is the series’ darkest and most gripping voyage: catastrophe, courage, and comradeship, told by a master at the peak of his powers.
Margaret Preston — ‘a red-headed little firebrand of a woman’ — was Australia’s foremost woman painter between the wars, and she never stood still. In this acclaimed biography, Elizabeth Butel chronicles an artist who sent shock-waves through Australian art with her bold modernism and her fearless embrace of the new.
From her still lifes of banksias and native wildflowers to her pioneering woodcuts and her controversial championing of Aboriginal art, Preston forged a visual language that was unmistakably Australian and unmistakably modern. Butel traces her restless evolution — from realism to modernism and back — revealing a woman of fierce opinions, volcanic energy, and an uncompromising belief that Australian art should look like Australia.
Originally prepared by Penguin to accompany the landmark 1985 retrospective, Butel’s book remains the essential portrait of an artist who changed how a nation sees itself. Insightful, vivid, and beautifully illustrated in spirit, it captures Preston at full fire: the innovator, the polemicist, and the painter who made native flowers unforgettable.
This e-book edition brings the best-selling biography of one of Australia’s greatest artists to your screen.
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