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The Devil's Advocate
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In an impoverished village in southern Italy, the enigmatic life and mysterious death of Giacomo Nerone has inspired talk of sainthood.
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Father Blaise Meredith, a dying English priest, is sent by the Vatican to investigate. As he tries to untangle the web of facts, rumours, and outright lies that surround Nerone, The Devil's Advocate reminds us how the power of goodness ultimately prevails over despair.
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The Devil's Advocate was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W.H. Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, and it was also made into a film. It sold 3 million copies in its first two years and remains one of Morris West’s most popular novels.
The Shoes of the Fisherman
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The pope is dead and the corridors of the Vatican hum with intrigue as cardinals gather to elect his successor. The result is a surprise; the new pope is the youngest of them all— a bearded Ukrainian.
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Shoes of the Fisherman is the moving story of Kiril I, recently released from seventeen years in Siberian labour camps and haunted by his past. Not only is he leader of a fractured Catholic Church, but he also finds he has to confront his inquisitor and tormentor in order to avert another world war.
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An international bestseller, Shoes of the Fisherman is one of the great novels of the 20th century and still widely read today. It is the first novel in Morris West’s Vatican Trilogy.
The Clowns of God
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Pope Gregory XVII, has spent a lifetime quietly serving the Church he loves—until he announces a prophecy so alarming that it threatens to tear the Vatican apart.
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Terrified, the Vatican cardinals imprison him in a monastery. But is Is he mad as they believe, or is it an elaborate plot?
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An old friend sets out on an incredible quest to find out. On the way, he discovers the power of love and faith, while terrorists and politicians use every deadly and unholy power to stop him.
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The Clowns of God was on the New York Times bestseller list for 22 weeks, and is the second novel in Morris West’s Vatican Trilogy.
Lazarus
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Iron-fisted Pope Leo emerges from open heart surgery with the chilling realisation that his reforms have devastated the church.
As he struggles to overcome the policies he himself put into place, he must battle enemies from within the Vatican, as well as Islamic terrorists determined to assassinate him. Amid political intrigue and counterespionage, his brilliant surgeon Salviati becomes a target too, along with his beautiful mistress Tove and her fragile daughter, as the plot builds to a dramatic climax.
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Lazarus completes Morris West’s bestselling Vatican Trilogy, following The Shoes of the Fisherman and The Clowns of God. It can also be read on its own as a gripping exploration of church politics in a world of crises.
The Big Story
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Richard Ashley is a journalist who cares about the truth, and he’s about to break the greatest story of his career.
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Italy’s ruling clique is rotten to the core. A scandal centred on Vittorio Duke of Orgagna, points to a web of corruption and deceit emanating from his estate in the south.
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But Ashley finds that the truth is not all it seems when he falls in love with Orgagna’s wife. Everything is more complicated, more passionate than before, and tainted by death. Suddenly Ashley’s greatest story threatens to be his last.
Cassidy​
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Even in death, Cassidy is larger than life.
Charles Parnell Cassidy is a powerful politician. He’s a backroom fixer: generous, but also greedy and cunning. Martin Gregory is his disenchanted protégé who, having married Cassidy’s daughter and become a success on his own terms, scorns his father-in-law.
When the terminally ill Cassidy arrives in London to die, he makes Gregory the executor of his will and sets a complex trap by offering him the keys to a vast empire of wealth and corruption spanning Australia and Southeast Asia. With Cassidy’s evil influence ever present, Gregory tries to unravel the old man’s complicated obligations and debts, while struggling to ensure the security of his family.
Children of the Sun
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Eight years old, his body is so small, his face so pinched, you would take him for five or six. Antonino is an abandoned child struggling for survival in the dark alleys of Naples. He is one of thousands whose waking hours are spent in petty crime, and whose bed is a street grate above a baker’s oven.
Yet there is hope, in the shape of a young priest, Mario Borrelli. In a journey of self-transformation and love, Father Borrelli befriends the street children, and sets up a support network for them: The House of the Urchins.
The Concubine
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Mick McCreary is an oilman out of a job. His only possessions are a plane ticket to Singapore, a month’s pay in Indonesian rupiahs, and the luck of the Irish.
When the mysterious Mr Rubensohn approaches him with the offer of a breathtaking salary for a drilling operation on a remote island – no questions asked – he thinks that luck is running with him once more.
But then he meets beautiful Lisette, and within twenty-four hours he is involved in murder, intrigue and an international fraud of frightening proportions.
Daughter of Silence
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At high noon on a hot summer’s day, a beautiful young woman shoots the mayor dead.
So begins a story of passion and betrayal in a quiet Tuscan village, leading to a sensational trial. The defence team, headed by the brilliant but unhappy Carlo, uncovers a sinister conspiracy of silence that threatens to split the community.
Can Carlo persuade the judge to grant clemency in what appears to be an open and shut case? Can the law intervene in the brutal tradition of vendetta?
Eminence
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As a young and outspoken priest, Luca Rossini was brutally tortured in an Argentine military prison, and then nursed to health by the beautiful Isabel.
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Exiled to Rome to avoid scandal, Rossini becomes a cardinal and the pope’s confidante. He is admired and feared by his colleagues, for Rossini understands the Church, speaks frankly, and knows how to present his ancient faith to the media. When the pope becomes gravely ill and a successor must be chosen, Rossini takes a central role.
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In the midst of the political intrigue that surrounds the selection of a new pope, Isabel arrives in Rome—along with Rossini’s daughter. Rossini must suddenly confront painful memories of Argentina and the scandalous passion of his long-suspended love affair.
Gallows on the Sand​​
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Twenty chests of minted Spanish gold in a sunken galleon – this is the lure that brings historian Renn Lundigan to a tiny island off Australia’s Barrier Reef.
Renn enlists islander Johnny Akimoto to teach him scuba diving, but he soon realises there’s a far greater danger in the reef than the sharks. Gambling den owner Manny Mannix has followed him to the island, and now he threatens not only Renn and Johnny, but also the beautiful young scientist Pat Mitchell.
Harlequin
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Paul Desmond admires his close friend George Harlequin for his impeccable European breeding. Head of a prestigious Swiss bank, Harlequin belongs to a vanishing class of gentlemen whose handshake is their bond.
Then their gilded world is blown apart. A computer
print-out identifies the Harlequin et Cie bank as the target of a gigantic take-over. The mastermind is Basil Yanko, a ruthless financial genius whose instruments are fraud, blackmail and terror.
As the conflict moves from Zurich to London, New York and Mexico, Harlequin must become a “villain by necessity.” Can Desmond help his friend Harlequin save his bank – and his family?
Kundu
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In a valley deep in the highlands of New Guinea lives a small colony of Europeans. One of them is Kurt Sonderfield, a doctor with a shady past who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.
N’Daria is a hauntingly beautiful native girl whom Sonderfield has trained in the arts of love and the dread science of biological warfare. Kumo is a young sorcerer who has fallen under Sonderfield’s sway. Only two dare oppose Sonderfield’s ruthless machinations: the old French missionary Père Louis, and Gerda, the wife Sonderfield has betrayed.
As the passions and power plays of the Europeans collide
with ancient highland magic, the beat of the kundu drums thunders through the valley, bringing the story to an explosive climax.
The Last Confession
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One of the most famous victims of the Holy Office of the Inquisition was the brilliant Dominican monk Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1600.
Morris West recreates Bruno’s intimate thoughts as he languishes in Rome’s worst prison for seven years. This diary of Bruno’s reflections and frank memories of his life reveals him to be both a fine thinker and a flawed priest— and a man willing to pay the highest price to be true to himself.
This was West’s final novel, published posthumously. Written with passion and compassion, this is a voice which mesmerises from the first.
The Lovers
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On Bryan Cavanagh’s birthday, a sealed letter from Rome arrives, bearing the arms of the ancient house of the Farnese di Mongrifone. Affectionate, imperious, it is a summons from the woman he loved – and lost – in the turbulent, opportunistic world of post-war Europe.
Beset by his memories of an extraordinary voyage on a private yacht on the Mediterranean forty years earlier, Bryan returns to Rome, where he discovers a closely guarded secret.
Masterclass
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When the daughter of an old Florentine family dies, she leaves a bequest to her lover Max Mather, an American art historian who has been managing the family’s rare art collection. Max is left with two priceless artworks by the great Renaissance master Raphael—without the family’s knowledge.
As Max contrives to have the artworks discovered at auction in New York, big-time collectors, dealers and auctioneers are drawn into his game. In trying to out-deal the deal-makers, he becomes embroiled in a tangled web surrounding the brutal murder of a promiscuous Manhattan painter, Madeleine Bayard.
The two stories intertwine in a fast-paced tale of intrigue and murder in the international art trade.
The Naked Country​
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Lance Dillon is boss-man of a new cattle station on the southern fringe of Australia’s Arnhem Land. When an Aboriginal hunting party ritually kills Dillon’s prize stud bull, and then spears him in the shoulder, it’s clear they want him off their traditional land.
Under the merciless rays of the burning sun, the wounded Dillon sets off, with Mundaru in hot pursuit.
Dillon’s city-born wife Mary and Neil Adams, the tough and handsome local policeman, set out together to search for the lost man. The gruelling journey throws them together, and it is not long before each is secretly hoping that Dillon is never found alive.
It is a terrifying manhunt set in one of the harshest and most remote regions of the world.
The Navigator
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Son of a Norwegian master-mariner, grandson of Kaloni, the last of the great Polynesian navigators, Gunnar Thorkild is a man consumed by a dream. Convinced that the Polynesians’ legendary Island of the Dead is real, he risks his career, his life—and those of his fellow-venturers—to find it.
Shipwrecked on the very island they seek, the castaways discover they must leave behind everything they know and rely upon. To survive in this lush tropical paradise, they must make new laws of power and property, of sex and marriage.
The Navigator is a gripping tale of sea lore, shipwreck and moral courage.
Proteus
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Big John Spada is a self-made millionaire with a multinational corporation. From his headquarters in New York, he directs enterprises around the world with military precision. Privately Spada funds Proteus, a clandestine movement which works to free political prisoners and combat tyrants wherever they may be.
Spada’s daughter Teresa, a doctor, has recently married Rodolfo, an Argentinian. News arrives that the Buenos Aires secret police have arrested Teresa after she performed an emergency operation on a man with gunshot wounds. The secret police then take Rodolfo, whose outspoken editorials have angered Argentina’s fascist government.
A scheme is hatched by Proteus to rescue them. Soon the enemies of Proteus target Spada himself, and he issues a chilling threat to the world.
The Ringmaster
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Autumn 1990. The world teeters on the edge of war in the Gulf, Germany is reunited and a crumbling USSR stares ruin in the face. In Japan, a group of powerful men and women gather to create a rescue plan which will bring all three countries together for the first time in fifty years.
Polyglot international publisher, Gill Langton is mediator-in-chief. Treading the highest wire of global power-broking, he alone can balance politics with intrigue, manoeuvre with counter-manoeuvre. But his love for the beautiful, enigmatic Martha could bring it all tumbling down around him.
The Salamander
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An Italian general is found dead in his apartment. Next to his body is a small card inscribed with a salamander in a bed of flames.
Dante Matucci, a captain in the Italian secret service, begins an investigation which leads him into a maze of political violence and intrigue. He meets the general’s former mistress, Lili Anders, and embarks on a dangerous affair with the beautiful one-time spy. Soon he is drawn into the net of the great Salamander himself, millionaire industrialist Bruno Manzini, who is pitting his wits against the elaborate machinery threatening Italy’s government.
In a game of high power and influence, how much is Matucci prepared to pay to survive?
The Second Victory
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In the winter of 1945 the war is over, but it is a time of armistice, not peace. Austria is grieving its defeat and the loss of a generation of men; it is a land without leaders. To men like Major Mark Hanlon, Occupation Commander of the town of Bad Quellenberg, falls the task of destroying once and for all the legacy the Nazis.
When his driver is murdered by an Austrian soldier Hanlon is determined to bring the soldier to justice, but it proves to be difficult in a community where nearly everyone has something to hide.
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Morris West’s fast-moving story brilliantly evokes the atmosphere of a small Alpine community under occupation in a traumatized Europe.
Summer of the Red Wolf
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A famous writer is in desperate search of a peaceful place to recharge his spirits. An old friend offers his house in the windswept islands of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, and he grabs the opportunity.
On the way, a car accident throws him together with the raven-haired doctor Kathleen McNeil. He also falls in with the Red Wolf, a man who lives by the old codes, some of them violent. A love triangle develops...
Summer of the Red Wolf is an epic story for a modern age. Its fast-paced narrative is driven by the timeless themes of love and jealousy, in a rugged landscape.
Vanishing Point
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Carl Strassberger’s comfortable life pursuing his artistic career in the south of France is shattered when his brother-in-law Larry Lucas, the heir to the family banking business, suddenly vanishes after landing a multi-million dollar deal.
Going undercover to investigate Larry’s disappearance,
Carl uncovers a sinister travel company that helps wealthy, unhappy clients disappear. But Carl fears Larry is dead—or worse.
Vanishing Point is a story of flight and pursuit, of financial intrigue, of old and menacing secrets unearthed, and of normal lives thrust suddenly into violent confusion.
The World is Made of Glass
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A cryptic and mysterious case history appears in the autobiography of pioneering Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. ‘A lady came to my office. She refused to give her name…she wished to have only one consultation. What she had to communicate to me was a confession. Some twenty years ago, she had committed a murder…’
Morris West recreates this encounter in a gripping blend of truth and dramatic speculation, set in pre-World War I Europe.
Jung’s encounter with the unnamed woman had an explosive effect on Jung and brought him very close to a total breakdown. The story of the woman herself will continue to haunt the reader long after the last page is turned.
The World is Made of Glass is a powerful novel of love, sexual obsession, murder and guilt. It has been called Morris West’s finest creation of the imagination.