Homebush Boy

Thomas Keneally

Aug 2016 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

In this playful and poignant memoir, Thomas Keneally returns to his adolescence in the suburbs of Sydney in 1952. At sixteen, the red-haired teenager idolized the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and had aspirations of becoming a star on the track or rugby field. He also dreamed of wooing the beautiful and alluring Bernadette Curran until the day she announces her desire to become a nun. For the first time, Keneally started to consider priesthood himself.
 
An insightful portrait of the transition from childhood to adulthood, Homebush Boy affectionately captures the awkwardness, grace, and all the contradictions of being a teenager.
 

About the author

Thomas Keneally is the celebrated writer of Shindler’s Ark, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1982 and was later made into the Steven Spielberg–Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List. He has written over thirty books, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as plays and essays. He won the Miles Franklin Award consecutively for his novels Bring Larks and Heroes (1967) and Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968). The People’s Train was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, South East Asia division. His most recent novels are The Daughters Of Mars, which was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize in 2013, and Shame and the Captives. His non-fiction includes the memoirs Homebush Boy and Searching For Schindler; Three Famines, an LA Times Book of the Year; and the histories The Commonwealth of Thieves, The Great Shame, American Scoundrel and the three volume series Australians. Keneally was born in 1935 in New South Wales and now lives in Sydney with his wife and two daughters.