Only Killers and Thieves

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Only Killers and Thieves

Audio CD(Unabridged)

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Audio CD(Unabridged)
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Overview

Reminiscent of Philipp Meyer's THE SON and the novels of Cormac McCarthy, this riveting debut novel set in 1880's Australia, tells the story of two brothers who are exposed to the brutal reality of frontier life after their parents' murder.

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ISBN-13:	9781538500026
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/06/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)

About the Author

Paul Howarth was born and grew up in Great Britain before moving to Melbourne in his late twenties. He lived in Australia for more than six years, gained dual citizenship in 2012, and now lives in Norwich, United Kingdom, with his family. In 2015, he received a master’s degree from the University of East Anglia’s creative writing program, the most prestigious course of its kind in the UK, where he was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship.

From the B&N Reads Blog

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Introducing the Life-Changing Finalists for the 2018 Discover Awards

For more than 25 years, the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program has worked to identify and amplify the voices of those new authors writing books with the potential to change readers’ lives. Each year, our selection committee, made up of smart, engaged, and incredibly well-read booksellers, pores over piles of new releases […]

11/27/2017
A quest for frontier justice drives the events of Howarth’s devastating and impressive debut, set in the Australian outback in 1885. Sixteen-year-old Billy McBride and his 14-year-old brother, Tommy, are orphaned when, they believe, their rancher father’s disgruntled aboriginal stockman guns down their parents and younger sister in cold blood. Enlisting the help of neighboring rancher John Sullivan (with whom their father had a prickly relationship) and Edmund Noone, an inspector with the Native Mounted Police, the boys embark on a manhunt. Things quickly go awry when their confederates use evidence Billy fabricated as a pretext to slaughter the alleged culprit’s entire tribe. This atrocity is emblematic of the novel’s theme concerning the strained relations between white settlers and the natives whom they have displaced from their lands. Howarth skillfully uses the fraying relationship between the two brothers—Billy embraces vigilantism with vengeful zeal, while Tommy is revolted by both the carnage and its effect on his brother—to illustrate the moral issues at the heart of his story. The narrative is empowered further by his searing descriptions of the outback, a drought-ridden landscape of desiccation and death that provides a backdrop as bleak and merciless as the characters who move against it. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Rich in character and period atmosphere, this effective blend of family saga and historical mystery will please fans of Jeffrey Archer and Wilbur Smith.

Booklist

I couldn’t put Only Killers and Thieves down. It does what great Westerns do, it drops you inside the ugliness and chaos of Australian frontier life, it educates and horrifies, but also it entertains. Howarth’s debut is a powerhouse page turner.”

Willy Vlautin

A gripping novel about conflict in the Australian outback at the turn of the century; beautifully done.

Paulette Jiles

Everywhere alive with vivid evocations of a landscape as punishing as it is beautiful and vibrant characters who would be just as at home in Blood Meridian or Butcher’s Crossing, Only Killers and Thieves compels and convinces from the start. This is a thrilling book and Paul Howarth a writer of tremendous talent.

Laird Hunt

Howarth manages to infuse the old tropes with a depth of emotion and moral complication that will stay with readers long after closing the book.

BookPage

★ 01/01/2018
In this powerful debut novel, set in 1870s Australia, two teenage brothers ride into the desert interior, along with an unscrupulous neighbor and a cadre of the infamous Native Police Force, to avenge the deaths of the boys' family. Billy is the elder, but Tommy, the central protagonist, is more intuitive and comes to realize the troop's actual intent: a genocidal raid on remaining aboriginal inhabitants. With sweeping descriptions of landscape and the journey's hardships, the novel feels like a modern Western along the lines of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. Howarth's narrative is almost cinematic and, like a modern Western film, includes scenes of graphic violence. Tommy's empathy with the natives he encounters immerses readers in the history of Australia's treatment of its indigenous people. Howarth is British but lived in Australia for several years and here draws on his research of the Queensland Native Police Force. U.S. readers will make the connection with our country's oppression of Native Americans and gain an understanding of the fundamental racism of both former British colonies. VERDICT Highly recommended; Howarth is a novelist to watch.—Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Library Journal

★ 2017-11-14
Howarth's impressive debut is a Wild West saga transported to 19th-century Queensland, Australia. Two brothers come of age during a bloody wilderness manhunt against the background of a shameful era in Australia's racial history.Brothers Tommy and Billy are the sons of rancher Ned McBride, who's barely surviving under the thumb of land baron John Sullivan. Sullivan's local rule is aided by his association with Inspector Edmund Noone, a leader of the Native Mounted Police, which carried out the genocide of Australia's indigenous people. Racial tensions escalate after the two brothers witness a lynching, and soon afterward they find their parents murdered—apparently by their aboriginal stockman Joseph, whose gun is found nearby. They have no choice but to join forces with Noone and Sullivan, who set out to take revenge on Joseph—or on any other tribal people they encounter on the hunt for him. The story deals unflinchingly with the brutality of Australian rule, and the true circumstances of the parents' murders are ultimately revealed. But the heart of the story is the complicated relationship between the brothers, as Tommy's developing conscience threatens his bond with the older Billy, who has committed to Sullivan's cause. One turning point for Tommy is his attachment to an aboriginal woman whose family has been slaughtered by their posse.While this book has a historical point to make, it also works as a suspenseful mystery and a resonant bildungsroman.

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