Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia Book

With the authority of a brilliant historian and the narrative grace of a great novelist, Keneally recounts the founding of the first penal colony in Australia in 1788. Unabridged. 11 CDs.

The New York Times - Alison McCulloch

In his more than 40 years as an author, the Australian-born Keneally has made a specialty of writing about history, both in fiction (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Schindler s List, for example) and in popular nonfiction (notably American Scoundrel, his biography of the Civil War general Dan Sickles, and The Great Shame, about the Irish diaspora). Here, he turns his novelist s eye to the first four years of white Australia, folding the dreary facts and figures into the more engaging elements of character and narrative.