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The Book of Science and Antiquities

By Keneally, Thomas

Read by Haley, Paul

9.43 hrs • 8 CDs • Unabridged

Genre: FICTION  /  GENERAL & LITERARY FICTION  /  HISTORICAL

Release Date: 01/01/2020

© 2020 by Simon & Schuster

ISBN No : 9781508286127

3 customer reviews

$39.90

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In a novel of breathtaking reach and inspired imagination, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's Ark tells the stories of two men who have much in common. What separates them is 42,000 years.

Shade lives with his second wife amid their clan on the shores of a bountiful lake. A peaceable man, he knows that when danger threatens, the Hero ancestors will call on him to kill, or sacrifice himself, to save his people.

Over 40,000 years later, Shade's remains are unearthed near the now dry Lake Learned in New South Wales. The sensational discovery fascinates Shelby Apple, a documentary film maker who tracks the controversies it provokes about who the continent's first inhabitants were and where Shade's bones belong.

Shelby goes on to follow his own heroes to the battlefields of Eritrea and the Rift Valley where Homo sapiens sprang from. When he, too, faces mortality and looks back on his passions, ideals and sorely tested marriage, Learned Man stands as an enduring spirit, a fellow player in the long, ever-evolving story of humankind.

"Uncovers a rich hidden seam in Australian history...Passionate and heartfelt.” (The Times (London))

"Vigorous, bighearted and terrifically direct.” (Daily Mail (London))

“[A] brave and complex book.” (Irish Examiner (Cork))

“Tackles meaty themes and tricky parallels . . . Wonderfully imaginative.”  (The Mail on Sunday (London))

“This is a story of how to die but also of how to live . . . Consistently engaging, provocative and original . . . Keneally’s art is to make the profound accessible. The important is rendered seamlessly . . . The simple message is that there is a communality to the human experience that spans forty-two thousand years.” (The Herald (Glasgow))

“A blunt meditation on last things, but still electric with life, passion and appetite...The account of two exceptional men who have lived ordinary lives: ordinary in the sense that they may be viewed as universal, as experiences of what it is to be a man, with all the virtues and humiliations that attend that station, across time and space...[An] intensely personal, hugely inventive and often moving novel.”  (The Australian)

"A rather brave book. This impressive sketch of ghostly affinities between a man who makes images at once artistic and real out of the life he records and shapes, and another who conjures and kills and wills himself on the tightrope of justice and mercy in a time that Keneally is very adept at animating." (The Saturday Paper (Australia))

"A rather brave book. This impressive sketch of ghostly affinities between a man who makes images at once artistic and real out of the life he records and shapes, and another who conjures and kills and wills himself on the tightrope of justice and mercy in a time that Keneally is very adept at animating." (The Saturday Paper (Australia))

"A rather brave book. This impressive sketch of ghostly affinities between a man who makes images at once artistic and real out of the life he records and shapes, and another who conjures and kills and wills himself on the tightrope of justice and mercy in a time that Keneally is very adept at animating." (The Saturday Paper (Australia))

"A rather brave book. This impressive sketch of ghostly affinities between a man who makes images at once artistic and real out of the life he records and shapes, and another who conjures and kills and wills himself on the tightrope of justice and mercy in a time that Keneally is very adept at animating." (The Saturday Paper (Australia))