New Releases by John Birmingham

Jed Culver, President Kipper''s sword and shield, knows that what is right and what is best are rarely the same thing. To some, Mad Jackson Blackstone, rogue governor of the Republic of Texas, is slowly but surely destroying the United States. In New York, Caitlin Monroe''s one shot at vengeance may lie buried beneath the rubble of the city, but she has to be certain. Unknown killers hunt Lady Julianne Balwyn in the anarchic, violent freeport of Darwin. Sofia Pieraro is all alone in the empty heart of a haunted land, revenge her only reason to keep moving. After many years the long trail of the dead will bring them all together. The final battle for America and the new world will not be fought with armies, but in the quiet and the dark, by individuals, driven towards vengeance and annihilation.

An electrifying, epic history of the city of Sydney as you have never seen her before. ''To peer deeply into this ghost city, the one lying beneath the surface, is to understand that Sydney has a soul and that it is a very dark place indeed.'' Beneath the shining harbour, amid the towers of global greed and deep inside the bad-drugs madness of the suburban wastelands, lies Sydney''s shadow history. Terrifying tsunamis, corpse-robbing morgue staff, killer cops, neo-Nazis, power junkies and bumbling SWOS teams electrify this epic tale of a city with a cold vacuum for a moral core. Birmingham drills beneath the cover story of a successful multicultural metropolis and melts the boundaries between past and present to reveal a ghost city beneath the surface of concrete and glass. In Birmingham''s alternative history of Sydney, the yawning chasm between the megarich and the lumpen masses is as evident in the insane wealth of the new elites as it was in the head-spinning rapacity of the NSW Rum Corps. This is a city shattered by the nexus between government, big money and the underworld, where the glittering prizes go to the strong, not the just. Combining intensive research with the pace of a techno-thriller, John Birmingham creates a rich portrait of a city too dazzled by its own gorgeous reflection to care much for what lies at its dark, corrupted heart. Illuminated by wild flashes of black humour, violent, ghoulish and utterly compelling, Leviathan is history for the Tarantino generation.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from John Birmingham''s Angels of Vengeance. The world changed forever when a massive wave of energy slammed into North America and wiped out 99 percent of the population. As the United States lay in ruins, chaos erupted across the globe. Now, while a skeleton American government tries to reconstruct the nation, swarms of pirates and foreign militias plunder the lawless wasteland where even the president is fair prey. In New York City, armies of heavily armed predators hold sway—and hold off a struggling U.S. military. In Texas, a rogue general bent on secession leads a brutal campaign against immigrants. And in England, a U.S. special ops agent enters a shadow war against a deadly enemy who has made the fight personal. While the president ponders a blitz attack on America’s once greatest city, the forces of order and anarchy wage all-out war for postapocalyptic dominance—and a handful of survivors must decide how far to go to salvage whatever uncertain future awaits . . . after America.

Our world went to hell on March 14, 2003. Four years after an inexplicable wave of energy decimated the American mainland, and then just as inexplicably disappeared a year later, US President James Kipper is no closer to explaining the catastrophe to the traumatised survivors. In a decaying New York City, an assassination attempt on the President prompts the suspicion that the looters overrunning Manhattan may be more organised and sinister than previously thought. Working on a farm in Texas to earn his citizenship, Miguel Pieraro believes in the promise of the New America. That is until tragedy cuts through his family. In the English countryside, Echelon agent Caitlin Monroe must once again fight for her life, a sharp reminder that her nemesis is active again. Then out of the smoking ruin of the Middle East comes an enemy that will be Kipper''s toughest challenge yet. The battle for the Wild East is just beginning, but does this New America, and its gun-shy President, have the strength of will to destroy the past in order to save the future?

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from John Birmingham''s After America. In Kuwait, American forces are locked and loaded for the invasion of Iraq. In Paris, a covert agent is close to cracking a terrorist cell. And just north of the equator, a sailboat manned by a drug runner and a pirate is witness to the unspeakable. In one instant, all around the world, everything will change. A wave of inexplicable energy slams into the continental United States. America as we know it vanishes. From a Texas lawyer who happens to be in the right place at the right time to an engineer in Seattle who becomes his city’s only hope, from a combat journalist trapped in the Middle East to a drug runner off the Mexican coast, Without Warning tells a fast, furious story of survival, violence, and a new, soul-shattering reality.

A wave of inexplicable energy has slammed into America. And destroyed it. What will the world do without its last Superpower? For the jihadists, Allah has performed a miracle. For the US and its allies, Armageddon has arrived. Australasia, far from the noxious waste darkening Europe''s skies, beckons as a possible oasis. Who and what will fill the void?

“The action is nonstop, the characters very real—and very different from each other—and, to coin a phrase, it makes you think.”—S. M. Stirling, author of Island in the Sea of Time In the year 2021, a multinational fleet—experimenting with untested weapons technology—pitched through time, crash-landing in 1942. The world is thrown into chaos as Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, Tojo, and Stalin scramble to adapt to new, high-tech killing tools, and twenty-first-century ways of war. For “uptimers” like Britain’s Prince Harry and the men and women who serve aboard the supercarrier USS Hillary Clinton, war is a constant struggle with their own downtime allies, who are mired in ignorance and bigotry. As the Allies counter the Nazi assault and set off for the coast of France, Japan begins to buckle, soon every battle will be played out in a lethal dance of might and intelligence, unholy alliances and desperate gambles, and each clash will be fought with the ultimate weapon; knowledge from the future. Thanks to the historical records, all sides know that two superpowers will emerge while the losers will be pounded into submission. But time has shifted on its axis, so none know who will survive or how peace will take hold in a world turned upside down. These are the questions that John Birmingham brilliantly answers in his critically acclaimed adventure of war and imagination.

The impossible has spawned the unthinkable. A near-future military experiment has thrust a US-led multinational armada back to 1942, right into the middle of the naval task force speeding towards Midway Atoll-and what was to be a spectacular Allied triumph in the war in the Pacific. In the chaos that ensues, thousands are killed, but the ripples have only just begun. For these veterans of Pearl Harbor have never seen a helicopter, or a satellite link, or a nuclear weapon. And they''ve never encountered an African American colonel or a female Australian submarine commander. While they embrace the armada''s awesome firepower, they may find the twenty-first-century sailors themselves far from acceptable. Initial jubilation at news the Allies would win the war is quickly doused by the chilling realisation that the time-travellers themselves-by their very presence-have rendered history null and void. Celebration turns to dread when the possibility arises that other elements of the twenty-first-century task force may also have made the trip-and might now be aiding the enemy forces. What happens next is anybody''s guess - and everybody''s nightmare...

In the fourth Quarterly Essay of 2005, John Birmingham ponders the Australian way of war. After East Timor and Bali, a combination of primal fear and primal ambition has transformed attitudes to our region, to security and to war as an instrument of politics. Australian defence policy has become more assertive and our armed forces are being radically restructured and hardened. Australia now has the capacity, and even the will, to act as a military power in its region. A Time for War begins with a gripping account of Operation Anaconda, the 2002 battle in Afghanistan to which Australian special forces made a crucial contribution. Birmingham also looks at our war dreaming: the sanctification of Anzac Day and the eclipse of the Vietnam Syndrome. Ranging from Sir John Monash to Peter Cosgrove, from Rudyard Kipling to The One Day of the Year, he finds that our armed forces can now do no wrong, and that politicians have taken note. The new militarism is not simply a response to September 11, he argues - it marks a deeper shift in the culture. "It being an RSL, we would stand each night at six o''clock for the prayer of remembrance. It was always a moving occasion, a strange suspended moment when the pokies and racing channel, the piped music and the drunken bullshitting all fell away ... Friends from overseas who witnessed the quiet ceremony never failed to be impressed. One, a poet from Czechoslovakia, had always thought Australians to be a shallow, soulless, materialistic people, but she changed her mind after her first experience of the ode to the fallen among the half-empty schooners and chip packets." —John Birmingham, A Time For War

"It?s World War II and the A-bomb is here to stay. The only question: Who?s going to drop it first?" -- publisher website (April 2007).

On the eve of America’s greatest victory in the Pacific, a catastrophic event disrupts the course of World War II, forever changing the rules of combat. . . . The impossible has spawned the unthinkable. A military experiment in the year 2021 has thrust an American-led multinational armada back to 1942, right into the middle of the U.S. naval task force speeding toward Midway Atoll—and what was to be the most spectacular U.S. triumph of the entire war. Thousands died in the chaos, but the ripples had only begun. For these veterans of Pearl Harbor—led by Admirals Nimitz, Halsey, and Spruance—have never seen a helicopter, or a satellite link, or a nuclear weapon. And they’ve never encountered an African American colonel or a British naval commander who was a woman and half-Pakistani. While they embrace the armada’s awesome firepower, they may find the twenty-first century sailors themselves far from acceptable. Initial jubilation at news the Allies would win the war is quickly doused by the chilling realization that the time travelers themselves—by their very presence—have rendered history null and void. Celebration turns to dread when the possibility arises that other elements of the twenty-first century task force may have also made the trip—and might now be aiding Yamamoto and the Japanese. What happens next is anybody’s guess—and everybody’s nightmare. . . .

On his tour of Australia Birmingham meets the dope smokers of Australia - and finds that they''re not what you might expect. Yes there are some sci-fi geeks, some student activists, and the obligatory Nimbin ferals, but he also finds himself smoking with conservative politicians, lawyers, cops, bankers and school teachers.

''THE NATION''S PREMIER GONZO JOURNALIST...Happy is the country that has its history written and interpreted by writers of the calibre of Birmingham.'' PETER CRAVEN, THE AUSTRALIAN ''A FINE JOURNALIST with an eye for the blended spaces between black and white, RELENTLESS CERTAINTY AND A FORMIDABLE VOICE.'' GRAEME BLUNDELL, THE AUSTRALIAN In OFF ONE''S TITS, hilarious social observer and fearless investigator John Birmingham turns his attention to what has made this country great - its men and women - and what has made it an embarrassment - its politicians, big business and law enforcement agencies. Half the book is an exploration and celebration of the wonderful world of men and the things they hold dear- booze, badness, bachelorhood, boxing, grog, misbehaving, masculinity, alcohol, footy, pork, piss and women. Scary stuff. The other half is a sobering, hard-hitting, searing account of injustice of the worst kind, police violence, political inertia, political slime and political evil. REALLY scary stuff. Intoxicatingly funny and soberingly compelling writing from both sides of one of our best and most surprising writers - enjoy!

He died with a felafel in his hand.

The hilarious follow up to bestseller He Died With a Felafel in His Hand.