Thomas Keneally Books in Order

As a seminary approaches a mass ordination, two murders shatter its closed world. Part mystery and part study of religious life, Keneally's first novel already shows his fascination with conscience and authority.

Drawing on wartime Australia, this early novel follows a boy living with anxiety, separation, and confused ideas of heroism while the larger violence of World War II presses in.

In a brutal late eighteenth-century penal colony, Irish marine Phelim Halloran is caught between authority and the condemned. Keneally makes settlement feel raw, improvised, and morally corrosive.

A questioning Catholic priest finds himself at odds with church authority and with his own calling. The novel is funny, sad, and sharply alive to institutional fear of change.

Years after a disastrous Antarctic expedition, the lone survivor lives with celebrity, guilt, and memory. Keneally uses the polar setting to explore grief, truth, and the stories people tell to keep going.

Barbara Glover cares for her strange, decaying parents on the edge of a northern swamp while her brother narrates. Grotesque, darkly funny, and unsettling, it is one of Keneally's strangest family novels.

Based on the story of Jimmy Governor, the novel follows an Aboriginal man driven toward violence by exploitation, racism, and the impossible demand that he fit two worlds at once.

This novel imagines Joan of Arc from village girl to national figure, dwelling on faith, voices, charisma, and the burdens placed on someone still very young.

Set during the armistice talks that ended World War I, this novel turns diplomacy into intimate human drama. Keneally pays special attention to Matthias Erzberger and the defeated German side.

Keneally retells the life of Moses, from the Egyptian court to the Exodus and the giving of the law, with an eye for both public legend and private strain.

A British Army doctor parachutes to an Adriatic island to aid Tito's partisans in World War II. The novel balances battlefield horror with hard questions about courage, ideology, and survival.

On an Antarctic expedition, a death becomes the center of a tense locked-room style mystery. Ice, isolation, and old resentments make this one of Keneally's most unusual novels.

In this playful children's adventure, Keneally reimagines bushranger Ned Kelly for younger readers, mixing Australian legend with oddity, danger, and comic invention.

Keneally's panoramic Civil War novel follows soldiers and civilians around Stonewall Jackson's army. It is less about battlefield glory than confusion, desire, exhaustion, and the grim pull of history.

Narrated from the womb, this strange and inventive novel follows an unborn child watching his parents' marriage fail, his mother unravel, and a fraught journey toward Australia begin.

Set in Australia in 1942, this wartime novel follows people trying to live, govern, and improvise under the pressure of invasion fears and global conflict.

Oskar Schindler begins the war as a profiteer and ends up saving more than a thousand Jews from Nazi murder. Keneally tells the story with documentary weight and the momentum of a novel.

Keneally looks at the Australian interior as both real place and national myth, tracing the harsh beauty, isolation, and human stories that gather around the bush.

When Terry Delaney becomes involved with the daughter of a Belarusian refugee, he is drawn into a family still torn by World War II. Past atrocity and present-day Australia collide with tragic force.

An accessible portrait of Australia that sketches the country's history, people, landscapes, and contradictions for general readers.

In the first years of the penal colony, convicts are ordered to stage a play. Out of rehearsals and punishments, Keneally builds a rich story about authority, performance, and the stubborn dignity of the imprisoned.

A taut moral thriller about power, guilt, and divided loyalties, this novel follows characters forced into choices that have no clean or comforting outcome.

A later reworking of Keneally's early novel The Fear, this book revisits wartime Australia through a boy's eyes, catching the unease of absence, duty, and growing up under pressure.

Blending reportage and narrative drive, Keneally follows the Eritrean struggle for independence through a landscape of war, endurance, and uneasy foreign witness.

An Aboriginal dance troupe on a flight from New York to Frankfurt becomes caught in a Palestinian hijacking. Keneally turns the thriller setup into a tense argument about homeland, identity, and political sympathy.

One of Keneally's early novels, this is a morally charged story about people trying to hold on to purpose and human connection while public events press hard on private lives.

Keneally explores place, family memory, and spiritual hunger in a story about the marks landscapes and old loyalties leave on the living.

After a devastating personal shock, Kate Gaffney-Kozinsky walks away from her Sydney life and heads into the Outback. What follows is a novel of grief, reinvention, and the strange freedom of starting over.

This collection reflects on Australia as a still-forming nation, mixing politics, history, and argument in Keneally's plainspoken, combative style.

Keneally makes the case for an Australian republic in clear, energetic prose, arguing through history, politics, and national symbolism rather than abstract theory alone.

Keneally tells the story of rugby league star Des Hasler, focusing on his versatility, competitiveness, and the hard realities of top-level football.

Set in the noisy orbit of television and celebrity, this novel looks at charisma, manipulation, and breakdown. Keneally uses media frenzy to ask what happens when performance swallows the person underneath.

Set in a New South Wales river town around Federation, the novel follows Tim Shea as politics, sectarian tension, and scandal disturb everyday life. Small-town loyalties matter here, and so do the grudges.

Keneally's memoir returns to his Catholic boyhood in wartime and postwar Sydney. Funny, sharp, and unsentimental, it shows how family, suburb, school, and ambition shaped the writer he became.

Using the Irish diaspora as his thread, Keneally follows rebels, convicts, migrants, and exiles across Ireland, Australia, and America. It is a broad, deeply peopled history of dispossession and survival.

Sisters Prim and Dimp Bettany are pulled together by an ancestor's journal and by modern crises reaching from Australia to Sudan. The novel links family memory, colonial violence, and the uses of history.

A compact life of Lincoln that follows his rise from frontier beginnings to the presidency, the Civil War, and emancipation. Keneally writes him as shrewd, humane, and politically tested at every turn.

This brisk biography follows Daniel Sickles, congressman, killer, Civil War general, and relentless self-promoter. Keneally makes the scandalous life readable while never losing sight of the violence around it.

In wartime Sydney, a Catholic priest is forced to reckon with duty, desire, and the damage done by institutions that value obedience over honesty. A morally tense novel about conscience under pressure.

A light, rhyming picture book in which kangaroos discover the fun and fuss of wearing shoes. It is playful, silly, and built for reading aloud.

Refugee writer Alan Sheriff looks back on the tyrant who ordered him to produce a masterpiece for the regime. Told from immigration detention in Australia, the novel blends satire, fear, and the cost of survival.

Keneally retells the founding of Australia through convicts, officials, and Indigenous encounters, showing how a brutal penal experiment became a nation. It is lively history without losing sight of the human cost.

A brief, hard-to-find Keneally work that turns on cross-cultural encounters, everyday appetite, and the small misunderstandings that reveal bigger truths about class, identity, and belonging.

Part memoir and part literary detective story, this book recounts how Keneally met Poldek Pfefferberg, researched Oskar Schindler, and wrote the novel that became Schindler's List.

Grace Waterhouse spends decades trying to understand the husband she barely knew before he died on a secret World War II mission. It is a quiet, moving novel about war, memory, and the lives left behind.

The first Australians volume begins with Aboriginal worlds and the arrival of the British, then carries readers through convict settlement, frontier violence, reform, gold, and the Eureka uprising.

Artem Samsurov flees tsarist Russia for Australia, only to be pulled back toward revolution. Keneally turns one exile's life into a sweeping story about idealism, disillusion, migration, and political faith.

Keneally examines the Irish, Bengali, and Ethiopian famines as human disasters shaped not just by crop failure but by policy, empire, and indifference. It is history with anger, compassion, and a clear moral edge.

Set in wartime Sydney, this novel follows a priest whose belief in innocence and order is tested by war, secrecy, and the messier truths of ordinary human desire.

This second Australians volume moves from the goldfields and Eureka into the decades before World War I, tracing immigrants, radicals, workers, women, and politicians as Australia edges toward nationhood.

This short work focuses on intimate human ties, showing how memory, loss, and small acts of tenderness can carry a life more than any grand event.

Sisters Naomi and Sally Durance leave home to serve as nurses in World War I. On hospital ships and near the front, they face exhaustion, grief, and the difficult work of staying human amid industrial slaughter.

In wartime rural Australia, Alice's uneasy friendship with an Italian POW unfolds alongside the mounting tension at a camp holding Japanese prisoners. The novel builds toward the Cowra breakout and its shattering aftermath.

In the third Australians volume, Keneally follows the country from the end of World War I through depression, war, postwar migration, and the Vietnam era, always keeping ordinary lives at the center.

Exiled on St Helena after Waterloo, Napoleon finds an unlikely friend in the spirited Betsy Balcombe. Their strange bond gives this historical novel both intimacy and a sharp sense of the damage power leaves behind.

Former priest Frank Docherty returns to Australia and is drawn into allegations of clerical abuse. The novel follows his struggle to seek truth inside an institution shaped by silence, loyalty, and shame.

This single-volume history condenses Keneally's Australians trilogy into a brisk, character-led account of the nation, from First Peoples and colonisation to migration, war, and Australia's changing place in Asia.

Gentleman convict Hugh Monsarrat and housekeeper Hannah Mulrooney investigate the slow poisoning of a commandant's wife at Port Macquarie. The mystery is sharp, but the real pull is the dangerous colonial world around them.

Keneally imagines power at its frailest by focusing on the last days of two old rulers. The novel strips grandeur away and leaves age, fear, memory, and the wreckage of history.

When a combative newspaper editor is shot dead in colonial Sydney, Hugh Monsarrat and Mrs Mulrooney are sent to investigate. The case opens onto corruption, censorship, and the fragile idea of a free press.

Now in Parramatta, Hugh Monsarrat is asked to take a statement from a woman accused of murder at the female factory. He and Mrs Mulrooney dig into a case shaped by cruelty, class, and power.

Documentary filmmaker Shelby Apple becomes obsessed with the prehistoric Learned Man, whose bones may link ancient Australia and Africa. Keneally pairs his quest with a deep-time story about sacrifice, kinship, and what survives.

Sixteen-year-old Plorn Dickens is shipped to colonial Australia to make something of himself. Far from London but never free of his father's fame, he stumbles into a rough, comic, surprising coming-of-age story.

A compact historical tale about loyalty, promises, and the dangerous force of agreements that outlast the moment in which they were made.

Sent to a remote penal settlement, Hugh Monsarrat and Mrs Mulrooney investigate a murder tangled up with authority, secrets, and the fragile power structures of the colony.

Part memoir, part essay collection, this book lets Keneally reflect on Australia, politics, faith, family, ageing, and death with wit, warmth, and impatience for cant.

A relic linked to Hitler passes through ordinary hands in this darkly ironic historical novel. Keneally uses the object to ask how war's symbols keep haunting the people who survive it.

A young woman faces judgment from law and society in a historical story about punishment, resilience, and the stubborn effort to claim a life of her own.