Roger McDonald The Following: Books by Roger McDonald published by Random House, Australia

THE FOLLOWING (2013)

‘A politician was a man apart, with power lent to him while it lasted, a sack of bones in a suit coat thereafter.'

Years ago, in a midnight encounter beside the railroad tracks, a young boy meets a stranger with a powerful secret, a gift of uncanny understanding and a talent for knots. From this encounter, Marcus Friendly's ideas of himself take shape as he rises to become Australia's sixteenth Prime Minister. The night he dies, a shadow, ‘thin as a scythe', is there to collect him when he falls. Another young boy, Ross Devlin, witnesses the event.

Ross eventually finds himself on an outback station working for Kyle Morrison, son of Australia's most famous poet, ‘The Bounder'. Kyle suddenly needs help to undo a knot of his own, and a young union organiser, Max Petersen, steps in to right an old injustice.

Now, after years in parliament, Max Petersen, the inheritor of the Marcus Friendly tradition in more ways than one, awaits a call from the PM for the ministry he craves. Around him, a crisis among friends and family is unfolding, and everyone is forced to confront the legacy they have inherited, their influence in a changing world and what follows on after them.

WHEN COLTS RAN (2011)

Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the Prime Minister's Prize for Literature

In this sweeping epic of friendship, toil, hope and failed promise, multi-award-winning author Roger McDonald follows the story of Kingsley Colts as he chases the ghost of himself through the decades, and in and out of the lives and affections of the citizens of 'The Isabel', a slice of Australia scattered with prospectors, artists, no-hopers and visionaries. Against this spacious backdrop of sheep stations, timeless landscapes and the Five Alls pub, men play out their fates, conduct their rivalries and hope for the best.

THE BALLAD OF DESMOND KALE (2006)

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award and the Adelaide Festival Book of the Year

In the early 1800s, out of the prison society of governors, redcoats, English gaolers, Irish convicts, and the few free settlers of Botany Bay, no one had ventured much farther inland than a few dozen miles from Sydney. Or so it was believed until the escape of Desmond Kale and the vengeance of his rival, the wildly eccentric parson magistrate Matthew Stanton. The Ballad of Desmond Kale is a broad-sweeping novel of the first days of British settlement in Australia.

MR DARWIN’S SHOOTER (1998)

Winner of the New South Wales, Victorian, and South Australian Premier's Prizes

The story of Syms Covington, Charles Darwin's manservant on the Beagle and afterwards. Mr Darwin’s Shooter re-creates the voyage of the Beagle, where Covington spends time exploring -- and collecting specimens -- inland. And we travel on to the Galapagos Islands, with their huge turtles and armadillos and remarkable finches. Years later, in Sydney's Watson's Bay in beset middle age, Covington awaits the arrival of the first copy of Darwin's The Origin of Species, which contains the scandalous theory of evolution. What part of his life might be in it? What truths may it contain? How can one man absorb the meaning of Creation? - See more at: http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/roger-mcdonald/mr-darwins-shooter-9780091836702.aspx#sthash.Q22psjaJ.dpuf

THE TREE IN CHANGING LIGHT (2001)

In The Tree In Changing Light, Roger McDonald meditates on our unique landscape and its rich tapestry of native and introduced trees, which 'give language to our existence'. His most intimate and personal book to date, it also celebrates country men like his grandfather Chester Bucknall, a forester and pine-planter, of whom he writes, 'I believe him to have been a dreamer about trees'; Wilf Crane, Roger McDonald's mentor with trees who flew planes across country on solo planting raids and whose death while flying inspired this book; and Tom Wyatt, a bush gardener whose dedicated hands made trees bloom in Queensland towns.

SHEARERS’ MOTEL (1992)

Winner of the National Book Award (Non-Fiction)

Into the hard-living world of travelling shearers in the Australian outback comes Roger McDonald, driving an old truck rattling with cooking gear and hoping to put writing behind him. Told with an insider's affection and familiarity sharpened by an outsider's perception, this moving account of working life in a classic Australian industry gives a new twist to a long tradition of outback travel writing. It confirms Roger McDonald as one of our finest and most lyrical chroniclers of the land - and of the human heart.

1915 (1979)

Winner of the Victorian and South Australian Premier's Prizes, Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award

The year young Australians sailed off to war in high hopes of adventure, only to find themselves faced with disaster. The tragedy and violence of Gallipoli provide the climax to this very personal, moving and surprisingly romantic story. Roger McDonald takes the reader on an archetypal Australian journey which parallels the nation's progress from its country childhood, through the adolescent exuberance of its young cities, to initiation on one of the world's ancient battlefields.

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Books by Roger McDonald published by Random House, Australia