Roaring Stories Event Titles

Uses for Obsession

A Chef's Memoir

By: Ben Shewry
Narrated by: Ben Shewry
Length: 8 hours 11 minutes

An intimate, searing and hopeful memoir meets manifesto that reframes the way we think about restaurants, cooking, hospitality, leadership and humanity from one of the most respected chefs in the world.

Chef and restaurateur Ben Shewry knows obsession well. Whether it's crispy-edged lasagne, saltwater crocodile ribs or the perfect potato,... Read more

Stone Yard Devotional

By: Charlotte Wood
Narrated by: Ailsa Piper
Length: 6 hours 36 minutes

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place she grew up, finding solace in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro.

She does not believe in God, doesn't know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident. As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of... Read more

Flawed Hero

By: Chris Masters
Narrated by: David Tredinnick
Length: 18 hours 52 minutes

The shocking story of the case against Australia's most highly decorated soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG, and the defamation trial of the century.

With a Victoria Cross and Medal for Gallantry, Ben Roberts-Smith was the most highly decorated Australian soldier, the best of the best. When he returned to civilian life, he became a poster boy for a... Read more

Idiots, Follies and Misadventures

By: Mikey Robins
Narrated by: Mikey Robins
Length: 11 hours 16 minutes

The history books are full of heroes and villains … but what about all the idiots? Comedian and armchair historian Mikey Robins tells the astonishing story of human stupidity, one idiot at a time.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe. Albert Einstein

History is full of heroes and villains.... Read more

Back to Bangka

Searching for the truth about a wartime massacre

By: Georgina Banks
Length: 9 hours 2 minutes

Bangka Strait, Indonesia, 1942. Allied ships are evacuating thousands in flight from Singapore, the island having fallen to Japanese Imperial forces. Facing terrifying assaults by fighter planes, one ship, the Vyner Brooke, is badly bombed and sinks. Its survivors swim or paddle for hours to the nearest land, a beach on Bangka Island, parched,... Read more

Man-Made

How the bias of the past is being built into the future

By: Tracey Spicer
Narrated by: Tracey Spicer
Length: 11 hours 12 minutes

Walkley Award-winning journalist Tracey Spicer exposes the next frontier of feminism through the lens of artificial intelligence. Man-Made aims to open readers’ eyes to a transformative technological shift in society and give them the tools to make positive change.

Winner, 2023 Australian Business Book Awards, Social Responsibility
Longlisted for... Read more

Thirst For Salt

By: Madelaine Lucas
Narrated by: Madelaine Lucas
Length: 8 hours 1 minute

It’s hard to remember now that I was once that girl, lying in the sand in my red swimsuit and swimming late into the day. Sharkbait, he called me.

It’s in the water where she first sees him: a local man almost twenty years her senior. Adrift in the summer after finishing college, a young woman is on holiday with her mother in an isolated... Read more

We Only Want What's Best

By: Carolyn Swindell
Narrated by: Ailsa Piper, Maddy Withington & Sarah Gaul
Length: 8 hours 50 minutes

A long-haul flight. Two ambitious dance mums. A child in danger.

Bridget and Simone aren’t friends. But their daughters are in the same dance troupe, so they’re flying to Los Angeles for the girls to perform at Disneyland. Simone’s daughter Zahra is indisputably a leader in the group, but Bridget’s daughter Becky is a talent on the rise.
Simone... Read more

Infidelity and Other Affairs

By: Kate Legge
Narrated by: Kate Legge
Length: 6 hours 26 minutes

What do you do when your partner’s infidelity upends your life? When you confront living on your own? In amongst parents dying, careers ending and becoming a grandparent?
As a journalist, Kate Legge often seeks answers to how people reckon with bad luck or bad decisions. When faced with her husband’s affair, she discovered a fault line of... Read more

Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

By: Heather Rose
Narrated by: Heather Rose
Length: 7 hours 15 minutes

A deeply personal collection filled with reflections on love, death, creativity and healing, from the award-winning author of Bruny and The Museum of Modern Love.
It occurred to me that nothing bad ever happens here. Every human life is perfect in its own way. We cannot understand that, because it seems like there is so much suffering. But maybe... Read more

I am NOT Fine, Thanks

By: Wil Anderson
Narrated by: Wil Anderson
Length: TBA

Good sense, good jokes, and good WIL - a book about enduring turbulent times with humour, community and just a dash of Apple Cider Vinegar.

'How are you?'

How am I? How am I? How do you think I am? I know in the Before Times the tradition was to reply, 'I'm fine, thanks.' Then you would ask how they were, and they would reply, 'I'm fine, thanks.'... Read more

Honeybee

By: Craig Silvey
Narrated by: Harvey Zielinski
Length: 12 hours 17 minutes

The highly anticipated new novel by the bestselling author of Jasper Jones. 'Find out who you are, and live that life.'

Late in the night, fourteen-year-old Sam Watson steps onto a quiet overpass, climbs over the rail and looks down at the road far below.

At the other end of the same bridge, an old man, Vic, smokes his last cigarette.

The two see... Read more

Runt

By: Craig Silvey
Narrated by: Genevieve Hegney
Length: 6 hours 12 minutes

A heart-warming, funny, beautifully told story for readers of all ages from the bestselling author of Jasper Jones and Honeybee.
'You don't have to carry the weight of the world in your tool belt.'
Annie Shearer likes to fix things. She lives in the country town of Upson Downs with her best friend, an adopted stray dog called Runt. The two share a... Read more

Seeing Other People

By: Diana Reid
Narrated by: Emma Leonard
Length: TBA

From the author of Love & Virtue, Seeing Other People is the darkly funny story of two very different sisters, and the summer that stretches their relationship almost to breaking point.

Charlie’s skin was stinging. Not with heat or sweat, but with that intense, body-defining self-consciousness—that sense of being watched. She lowered her eyes... Read more

My Sweet Guillotine

By: Jayne Tuttle
Narrated by: Jayne Tuttle
Length: 7 hours 46 minutes

Jayne Tuttle, acclaimed author of Paris or Die, returns to Paris with My Sweet Guillotine.

In the wake of a bizarre, shocking accident in Paris, Jayne finds herself back in the city in a strange limbo. Ignoring the past, she tries to move forward. There is theatre. Love. New friendships. A new neighbourhood. But the accident haunts her, forcing... Read more

Reasons not to Worry

How to be stoic in chaotic times

By: Brigid Delaney
Narrated by: Blazey Best
Length: 8 hours 22 minutes

We’re all searching for answers to the biggest questions: How can we be good? Find calm? Properly grieve? Beat FOMO? Work out what truly matters? Well, the good news is that the wisest minds in history asked the exact same questions—and they found answers. The ancient philosophy of Stoicism shows us that we are already in possession of the very... Read more

August in Kabul

America's last days in Afghanistan

By: Andrew Quilty
Narrated by: John Robertson
Length: 10 hours 21 minutes

Told through the eyes of witnesses to the fall of Kabul, Walkley award-winning journalist Andrew Quilty's debut publication offers a remarkable record of this historic moment.
As night fell on 15 August 2021, the Taliban entered Kabul, capital of Afghanistan. After a 20-year conflict with the United States, its Western allies and a proxy Afghan... Read more

Life and Death Decisions

By: Lachlan McIver
Narrated by: Daniel Fletcher
Length: 8 hours 41 minutes

The impossible job of a doctor in some of the world's wildest places.

‘I found Dad dead on the side of a dirt road. I was sixteen; he was forty-nine.’

After Lachlan McIver’s father suffers a sudden, fatal heart attack it sends him into a spiral of grief and outrage. This tragedy inspires him to become a doctor and he eventually finds his calling –... Read more

This Devastating Fever

By: Sophie Cunningham
Narrated by: Abbe Holmes
Length: 10 hours 39 minutes

Sometimes you need to delve into the past, to make sense of the present.

Alice had not expected to spend most of the twenty-first century writing about Leonard Woolf. When she stood on Morell Bridge watching fireworks explode from the rooftops of Melbourne at the start of a new millennium, she had only two thoughts. One was: the fireworks are... Read more

Raised By Wolves

By: Jess Ho
Narrated by: Monica Sayers
Length: TBA

Growing up Cantonese in the racist outer suburbs was hard enough for Jess Ho, but add in a dysfunctional family who only made peace over food, and it was clear that a normal life was never on the menu. Jess emerged from childhood with a major psychological complex and a kick-arse palate, traits that would help them fit right in to the messy... Read more