Penguin Books Australia

The drumming of the guns continued, with bursts of great intensity. It was as though a gale streamed overhead, piling up great waves of sound, and hurrying them onwards to crash in surf on the enemy entrenchments. The windless air about them, by its very stillness, made that unearthly music more terrible to hear.

Hailed by Eliot, Pound, Lawrence and Hemingway, and based on the author's own experiences...

'A staggeringly good first book' The Canberra Times

'The man can write' Bendigo Weekly

In 1916, one million men fought in the first battle of the Somme.  Victory hinged on their ability to capture a small village called Pozières.  After five attempts to seize it, the British called in the Anzacs to complete this seemingly impossible task.

It was the last-chance moment of the war.

In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. It became known as 'the surge'. 'Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences', he told a sceptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of...

The official companion book to the HBO® miniseries available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Hugh Ambrose's bestseller follows the struggles and triumphs of four US Marines and a US Navy carrier pilot fighting in the Pacific region during World War II. 

Between America's retreat from China in late November 1941 and the moment General MacArthur's airplane touched down on the Japanese mainland in August 1945, five men connected by happenstance fought the key battles of the war against Japan.

A fresh, gripping look at one of Western history's defining moments

the inspiration for our modern-day marathon comes form the legend of Philippides, who is said to have run 26 miles form Marathon to Athens to deliver the news of the Greeks' victory over the Persians.  Yet the battle of Marathon has had a far greater impact; it can even be seen as the most significant moment in our collective...

'This is the finest book yet written on platoon-level combat in the Iraq War.  Unforgettable - raw, moving, and rendered with literary control.  No one who reads this book will soon forget its imagery, words, or characters.'
STEVE COLL, author of The Bin Ladens

'This is an important contribution to Australian war literature . . . an engrossing history of a very important Anzac campaign.' SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

EVERY SCHOOL CHILDin Australia and New Zealand is brought up on the legend of the Anzacs. This, though, is the largely unknown story of another Anzac force which fought not at Gallipoli, but in Greece during World War II.

' Whatever it takes to get those bastards. The true nature of our Faustian bargain would not become clear until later, and maybe it needed a journalist as steely and tenacious as Jane Mayer to give us the full picture. 'The Dark Side' is about how the war on terror became 'a war on American ideals,' and Mayer gives this story all the weight and sorrow it deserves. Many books get tagged with the word...

In the first few years of the post-9/11 era, the established models for fighting 'small wars' proved distressingly ineffective against resilient insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.  As the insurgents fought Western armies to a stalemate, it was clear that a new approach was necessary.  David Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer, and one of the world's most influential experts on...

'Australian who don't read this book are short-changing themselves.' PETER RYAN, THE AUSTRALIAN

'A striking aspect of Ross McMullin's scrupulous biography is how little Elliott has been exaggerated by posterity . . . Pompey Elliott is a large book, and rightly.' GIDEON HAIGH, THE AGE

'May be the best Australian military biography yet to appear.' STEPHEN LOOSLEY, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

At exactly 1.30 p.m. on 1 September 1918, the dozen men of Nine Platoon, 21st Australian Infantry Battalion, rose from Elsa Trench and walked across a weedy beet-field toward the German defenders of Mont St Quentin. Within hours, three were dead and five more were wounded, one of whom died six weeks later. The survivors returned from war, more-or-less intact, to live through the next sixty-odd years...

In this intensely personal account, Barry Heard draws on his own experiences as a young conscript, along with those of his comrades to look back at life before, during, and after the Vietnam War. The result is a sympathetic vision of a group of young men who were sent off to war completely unprepared for the emotional and psychological impact it would have on them.

Both in their mid thirties and working in the Australian bush when war was declared in 1914 they were quick to enlist and were placed in the same machine gun section of the newly formed 16th...