Steve Tolbert – författare

Blood flows on the war-torn streets of Masar e-Sharif. To try to cope with that, and barbarous Taliban rule, Soraya illegally reads and attends a secret girls’ school. But when her mother is killed in a missile attack, all Soraya’s girlish dreams and aspirations appear to be crushed forever. One night, her father mentions a cousin living in the rich country of Australia and tells her she will be going there. To give hope to their family, her captive brother’s note says, she must journey to that beautiful, peaceful land of Australia. The first thing she will notice, the people smuggler informs her, is how hospitable Australians are. They will wave and shout their greetings, and helpful officials will be at the dock to assist her. Towards God is the journeying, Muhammed says to her as she leaves for Islamabad airport. So Soraya dares to dream again. Wouldn’t you?

Seven stories, six unique settings, many divergent themes and characters.

Seventeen-year-old Jacob returns to Bali in ‘Surfing for Wayan’. Once terrified of surfboards, he’s there to surf wild for four people, including his brother killed in the 2002 Bali bombing.  

In ‘Summits’, Lhotse speaks by cell phone to her father who’s dying in a blizzard on Mount Everest. Three months later she walks up Nepal’s Everest Track to view that mountain and share her thoughts. 

A young Afghan reflects on the event that spurred him into becoming a suicide bomber in ‘Remembering Nurila’.  

In ‘Tunnelling Cu Chi’ a Tasmanian boy, a Vietnamese-Australian girl and an American war veteran meet on a tour of Vietnam’s infamous Cu Chi Tunnels. Each is there to resolve their Vietnam War issues.

In ‘Another Door’ a friendship develops between a panic-struck girl going for her first driver’s licence and an old widower who’s obliged to renew his licence annually. 

During the bombing of Baghdad a young Iraqi-Australian boy struggles to make sense of media headlines in the prize-winning ‘Sandy Heads’.

After his granddad dies in ‘Fishing Manhattan’, a boy learns that places change and it’s important to love what you have. 

For readers of ages 12 to 112.

The smirks on their faces and that rubbish-bin needle. Her eyes and nose streaming tears and gunk, and that sleazebag’s hands all over her. So give him what he wanted after what he and his mongrel friends did to her? Bitter tears welled up again. ‘No,’ Jackson muttered to herself. ‘No way.’ There was enough anger, stubbornness and pride in her now to do this, if…

Locked up in his solitude, Pete felt lonelier than he ever thought possible. A wave of panic hit him. Jumping out of bed, he groped for his torch and burst out the back door. There were diversions out there: the moon, wavelets lapping, stars falling across the sky…

Both of them fleeing the outside world, eighteen-year-old Jackson and reclusive Pete meet on the remote east coast of Flinders Island. Unfortunately, the place is not remote enough.

Michael O’Leary’s life as a ‘weird and wacky’ word-fixated student changes after his mother is killed and his father badly wounded in a Jemaah Islamiah (JI) terrorist attack. In the company of his alter ego, Bounty Hunter Clint, Michael travels to Bali and Central Java intent on confronting JI operatives. At each stage of his mission, the seventeen-year-old meets mysterious people. None occupy his mind – and quickly his dreams – more than Sugi, a Muslim girl who may or may not be working with the ‘enemy’.

Transcontinental highwayman in his youth, Joe Broughton told himself vagabond living meant taking risks, cadging rides, living on the cheap. It could be scary, for sure, but intriguing too, his luck changing daily, having no idea what the next hour would bring or who he would be sharing it with. Now a septuagenarian widower, his daughter working overseas, his best friend recently deceased, Joe senses ''a steady drum beat of routine messaging that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday; that getting old is no better than dying young; that the good life exists only in his memories.'' As the decades-old embers of vagabondage stoke up again, he decides to head off into the unknown one last time, specifically to the Himalayas: quiet, Luddite-friendly, far removed from humanity gone Twitter-mad. In Indian-occupied Kashmir, after his sister is blinded, his brother killed in a violent protest, Sameer Pandith joins Hizbul Mujahideen as a freedom fighter. When India institutes martial law, he is sent east to Ladakh on a mission of retaliation. Joe and Sameer are fated to meet; first through an exercise in compassion, then in barbarity.