Thomas Keneally Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Place at Whitton (1964)
  2. The Fear (1965)
  3. Bring Larks and Heroes (1967)
  4. Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968)
  5. The Survivor (1969)
  6. A Dutiful Daughter (1971)
  7. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972)
  8. Blood Red, Sister Rose (1974)
  9. Gossip from the Forest (1975)
  10. Season in Purgatory (1976)
  11. Victim of the Aurora (1977)
  12. Ned Kelly and the City of Bees (1978)
  13. Confederates (1979)
  14. Passenger (1979)
  15. The Cut-Rate Kingdom (1980)
  16. Bullie’s House (1981)
  17. Schindler’s Ark (1982)
  18. A Family Madness (1985)
  19. The Playmaker (1987)
  20. To Asmara (1989)
  21. Act of Grace (1989)
  22. By the Line (1989)
  23. Flying Hero Class (1991)
  24. Chief of Staff (1992)
  25. Woman of the Inner Sea (1992)
  26. Jacko (1993)
  27. A River Town (1995)
  28. Bettany’s Book (2000)
  29. The Office of Innocence (2002)
  30. The Tyrant’s Novel (2003)
  31. Widow and Her Hero (2007)
  32. The People’s Train (2009)
  33. The Daughters of Mars (2012)
  34. Shame and the Captives (2014)
  35. Napoleon’s Last Island (2016)
  36. Crimes of the Father (2017)
  37. The Book of Science and Antiquities (2018)
  38. The Dickens Boy (2020)
  39. The Great Hunger (2021)

Collections

  1. The Thomas Keneally Collection (2020)

Novellas

  1. Blackberries (2012)

Non fiction

  1. Moses the Lawgiver (1975)
  2. Outback (1983)
  3. Australia: Beyond the Dreamtime (1987)
  4. Now and In Time To Be (1991)
  5. The Place Where Souls Are Born (1992)
  6. Memoirs from a Young Republic (1993)
  7. Our Republic (1993)
  8. Homebush Boy (1995)
  9. The Great Shame (1998)
  10. American Scoundrel (2002)
  11. Lincoln (2002)
  12. The Commonwealth of Thieves (2005)
  13. Searching for Schindler (2008)
  14. Australians (2010)
  15. Three Famines (2011)
  16. Australians: Eureka to the Diggers (2011)
  17. Australians: Flappers to Vietnam (2016)
  18. A Bloody Good Rant (2021)

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Thomas Keneally Books Overview

Bring Larks and Heroes

This novel is set in a remote British penal colony in the 1790s. It gives an insight into the settlement of hungry transports and corrupt soldiers, and tells the story of Corporal Phelim Halloran, and the demands made on him by superior officers and, most often, by his conscience.

The Survivor

ALEC RAMSEY IS The Survivor OF A DISASTROUS ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION WHICH ABANDONED HIS REVERED FRIEND AND LEADER OF THE PARTY, STEPHEN LEEMING. FOR FORTY YEARS, IN THE SECURITY OF ACADEMIA, RAMSEY HAS NURTURED WITH GUILT HIS DOUBTS ABOUT THIS INCIDENT. NOW LEEMING’S BODY IS, AGAINST ALL ODDS, TO BE EXHUMED FROM THE ANTARCTIC ICECAP, RAMSEY MUST CONFRONT HIS OBSESSION AND DECIDED WHETHER HE REALLY DID OR CAN CONTINUE TO SURVIVE AT ALL. WHAT, OF COURSE, HE FEARED WAS A CHANGE IN THE ESSENCE OF HIS LIFE, A CHANGE AS ABSOLUTE AS DEATH. ADVANCE COPIES SENT TO ED IWANICKI AND DAN FARLEY 25/1/85.

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

When Jimmie Blacksmith marries a white woman the backlash from both Jimmie’s tribe and white society initiates a series of dramatic events. As Jimmie tries to survive between two cultures, tensions build reaching a head when the Newbys, Jimmie’s white employers, try to break up his marriage. The Newby women are murdered and Jimmie flees, pursued by police and vigilantes.

Gossip from the Forest

A tale of personal prejudice and political obstinacy from the author of Schindler’s List. In 1918 at Compi gne, France, a group of intractable men negotiate to forge the armistice ending World War I. The Allies press for total submission; the Germans angle for compromise. So they talk on and on, while the guns roar and men die.

Season in Purgatory

During World War II, David Pelham, a young British surgeon, parachutes into Yugoslavia and sets up a hospital to aid Tito’s army. There he meets and loves the fiery Moja Javich, a resourceful partisan. Their love gives Pelham the strength to endure the atrocities of war as he seeks to avoid capture. Keneally has vigorously fleshed out ‘a bloody good novel’ Washington Post.

Victim of the Aurora

The thrilling story of an ill fated expedition to the South Pole by the bestselling and award winning author of Schindler’s List. In the waning years of the Edwardian era, a group of English gentleman adventurers led by Sir Eugene Stewart launched an expedition to reach the South Pole. More than sixty years later, Anthony Piers, the official artist of the New British South Polar Expedition, finally unveils the sobering conditions of their perilous journey: raging wind, bitter cold, fierce hunger, absolute darkness and murder. The first two decades of the twentieth century were known as the ‘heroic era’ of Antarctic exploration. In 1911, Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole. Weeks later, doomed British explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrived and then perished in a blizzard. And in 1914, Ernest Shackleton embarked on his infamous voyage to Antarctica. Set during this epic period of adventure and discovery, Victim of the Aurora re creates a thrilling time in an unforgiving place and is a brilliantly plotted tale of psychological suspense.

Ned Kelly and the City of Bees

As Ned Kelly lies in the hospital with appendicitis, the last thing he expects is to have a bee offer him a gold liquid that shrinks him to apian dimensions. Together with Nancy Clancy who speaks only in irritating rhymes, Ned rides off on the bee’s back to live in the hive, where he is enchanted by his new friends: Romeo the lovesick drone, Basil the activist, and haughty Queen Selma. Exciting and witty, Thomas Keneally’s delightful story will bring children hours of entertainment, even as it teaches them more about bees than they’d ever learn in school.

Confederates

Thomas Keneally’s epic of the Civil War takes us into the lives of four remarkable characters in the embattled Virginia summer of 1862: a southern hospital matron who is also a Union spy, a British war journalist with access to both sides, and two foot soldiers under Stonewall Jackson.

Schindler’s Ark

Winner of the Booker Prize Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction Schindler’s List is a remarkable work of fiction based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who, confronted with the horror of the extermination camps, gambled his life and fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers. Working with the actual testimony of Schindler’s Jews, Thomas Keneally artfully depicts the courage and shrewdness of an unlikely savior, a man who is a flawed mixture of hedonism and decency and who, in the presence of unutterable evil, transcends the limits of his own humanity.

A Family Madness

Inspired by a true incident that took place in Australia in 1984, this powerful and disturbing novel focuses on Rudi Kabbel, a survivor of Na*zi occupied Belorussia, and Terry Delaney, a young Australian rugby player who falls in love with Kabbel’s daughter. With the optimism and innocence of those unscathed by war, Delaney gropes to understand Kabbel’s outlook on life. All too slowly he grasps the implications of Kabbel’s vision, too late to averts its tragic consequences.

The Playmaker

In 1789 in Sydney Cove, the remotest penal colony of the British Empire, a group of convicts and one of their captors unite to stage a play. As felons, perjurers and who*res rehearse, their playmaker becomes strangely seduced. For the play’s power is mirrored in the rich, varied life of this primitive land, and, not least, in the convict and actress, Mary Brenham.

To Asmara

Set in the Horn of Africa, this novel charts the experiences of a group of travellers aiming for Asmara. The author’s previous books include 1984 Booker Prize winner ‘Schindler’s Ark’, ‘A Family Madness’, ‘The Playmaker’, ‘Confederates’, ‘The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith’ and ‘Gossip From the Forest’.

Flying Hero Class

Hijackers, representing a Palestinian faction, take over an airliner flying between New York and Frankfurt. But nothing is straightforward. The author also wrote ‘Schindler’s Ark’, ‘The Playmaker’ and ‘Towards Asmara’. This book was shortlisted for the ‘Sunday Express’ Book of the Year Award.

Woman of the Inner Sea

A moving story of heroism, filled with vivid characterizations, suspense, and a keen sense of mystery Kenneally’s most compelling work since his Booker Prize winning Schindler’s List. A woman who loses her husband’s love and attention to his mistress and his political dealings, and her children to a tragic fire, attempts to start anew in the Australian outback.

A River Town

Fleeing to Australia to escape the repressive life of British controlled Ireland, Tim Shea is alarmed by his new home’s equally stifling social order and its inclination towards prejudice. By the author of Schindler’s List.Tour.

Bettany’s Book

Prim, an aid worker in the Sudan, is contacted by her sister Dimp, who is back in Australia. She has come into possession of revealing documents concerning their ancestors: transported from Manchester, their great grandfather was the son of a convict, while their great grandmother was not only a convict too, but Jewish. As the story unfolds, through letters and a journal, of how John Bettany made his fortune, and of Sarah’s time in the notorious Female Factory, the sisters gain new perspectives on their roots. And as Prim’s travels progress, she realises that her life is paralleling the perilous paths taken by her great grandmother, and her enthusiasms and loves as well. A compelling portrait of the white origins of Australia, and of two adventurous, spirited young women, one hundred and fifty years apart.

The Office of Innocence

Thomas Keneally is a writer of extraordinary range: from Schindler’s List to The Great Shame his storytelling has engaged millions of readers. Now, after a brief departure into non fiction, he is back with a novel as timely as it is enduring. On the outskirts of Sydney, Father Frank Darragh is embarking on his new life of priesthood just as war erupts in the Pacific theater. American GIs pour into Father Darragh s neighborhood, and with them comes a reminder of the atrocities abounding nearby. Determined to shun hypocrisy, the earnest priest finds himself constantly at odds with his superiors, who frown on his efforts to rescue an errant black soldier and pay deathbed visits to the wayward. But Frank Darragh persists, becoming his parish s most popular confessor, particularly among wives of Australian servicemen who confront an array of temptations while their husbands are away. One such parishioner, Kate Heggarty, turns the tables of temptation on young Darragh, challenging his spiritual beliefs and stirring a vulnerable place in his heart. When Kate is found murdered, his anguish is only compounded by accusations that he caused her death. Poignantly depicting the conflicts between the secular and the holy, and between the family of Darragh s birth and the brotherhood of priests, OFFICE OF INNOCENCE is a tale set in the most compelling of circumstances. Drawing on his own experience studying for the priesthood in his youth, Thomas Keneally has created an endearing protagonist who speaks to the conundrums of our age while paying tribute to quiet heroes of the past. In the style of the best historians, Keneally allows the intrinsic power of the tales he tells and the people who populate his pages to draw the reader into a fully elaborated universe. The New York Times

The Tyrant’s Novel

Thomas Keneally’s literary achievements have been inspired by some of history s most intriguing events and characters, but in a rare reversal of time his brilliantly imagined new novel takes us into a near future that uncannily is all too familiar. In a detention camp where he is neither granted asylum nor readied to be sent back to his native land, a detainee bides his time. He insists on being called Alan Sheriff, a westernization of his given name; he was born in a country that had once been a friend to the United States but is now its enemy. Little else is known about Sheriff until a writer comes to interview him. Sheriff decides that the time is right to tell his visitor his story and embarks on the unraveling of events that have led to his current state with extraordinary detail the basis of which forms this novel within a novel. Sheriff is a celebrated novelist in a country in which its brutal leader orders Sheriff to ghostwrite a work of fiction: an uneasy combination of invention, autobiography, and polemic the very publication of which would overturn Western sanctions and shame the United States. The deadline is impossible, but the government enforcers guard his house and stalk his every move. It is not long before Sheriff becomes the tyrant s caged canary, as he races against the deadline that threatens to cost him everything and everyone he holds dear. In a work reminiscent of the classic Fahrenheit 451, Thomas Keneally has written a dazzling story of a man caught between the demands of his government and his impulse to run for his life. Provocative and possibly prophetic, The Tyrant s Novel is a literary achievement inspired by recent history s most intriguing events and characters. Here, Keneally once more combines, as he did in Schindler’s List, his fictional talent with his engagement in world politics.

Widow and Her Hero

‘I knew in general terms I was marrying a hero. The burden lay lightly on Leo, and to be a hero’s wife in times supposedly suited to the heroic caused a woman to swallow doubt. The Japanese had barely been turned away. It was heresy and unlucky to undermine young men at such a supreme hour.’ When Grace married the genial and handsome Captain Leo Waterhouse in Australia in 1943, they were young, in love and at war. Like many other young men and women, they were ready, willing and able to put the war effort first. They never seriously doubted that they would come through unscathed. But Leo never returned from a commando mission masterminded by his own hero figure, an eccentric and charismatic man who inspired total loyalty from those under his command. The world moved on to new alliances, leaving Grace, like so many widows, to bear the pain of losing the love of her life and wonder what it had all been for. Sixty years on, Grace is still haunted by the tragedy of her doomed hero when the real story of his ill fated secret mission is at last unearthed. As new fragments of her hero’s story emerge, Grace is forced to keep revising her picture of what happened to Leo and his fellow commandoes until she learns about the final piece in the jigsaw, and the ultimate betrayal.

The Place Where Souls Are Born

The Booker Prize winning author of Schindler’s List journeys to the American Southwest to chronicle the people and landscape of the region and profiles the characters, past and present, who have played a key role in the history of the Old West.

The Great Shame

‘Thomas Keneally recounts history with the uncanny skill of a great novelist whose only interest is to lay bare the human heart in all its hope and pain. As he was able to do in Schindler’s List, he shows us in The Great Shame a people despised and rejected to the point of death, who in the face of all their sorrows manage to keep their souls. This story of oppression, famine, and emigration a principal chapter in the story of man’s inhumanity to man becomes in Keneally’s hands an act of resurrection; Irishmen and Irishwomen of a century and a half ago live once more within the pages of this book.’ Thomas Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved CivilizationIn the nineteenth century, Ireland lost half of its population to famine, emigration to the United States and Canada, and the forced transportation of convicts to Australia. The forebears of Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List, were victims of that tragedy, and in The Great Shame Keneally has written an astonishing, monumental work that tells the full story of the Irish diaspora with the narrative grip and flair of a great novel. Based on unique research among little known sources, this masterly book surveys eighty years of Irish history through the eyes of political prisoners including Keneally’s ancestors who left Ireland in chains and eventually found glory, in one form or another, in Australia and America. We meet William Smith O’Brien, leader of an uprising at the height of the Irish Famine, who rose from solitary confinement in Australia to become the Mandela of his age; Thomas Francis Meagher, whose escape from Australian captivity led to a glittering American career as an orator, a Union general, and governor of Montana; John Mitchel, who became a Confederate newspaper reporter, gave two of his sons to the Southern cause, was imprisoned with Jefferson Davis and returned to Ireland to become mayor of Tipperary; and John Boyle O’Reilly, who fled a life sentence in Australia to become one of nineteenth century America’s leading literary lights. Through the lives of many such men and women famous and obscure, some heroes and some fools most a little of both, all of them stubborn, acutely sensitive, and devastatingly charming we become immersed in the Irish experience and its astonishing history. From Ireland to Canada and the United States to the bush towns of Australia, we are plunged into stories of tragedy, survival, and triumph. All are vividly portrayed in Keneally’s spellbinding prose, as he reveals the enormous influence the exiled Irish have had on the English speaking world.’A terrible and personal saga, history delivered with a scholar’s density of detail but with the individualizing power of a multi talented novelist.’ William Kennedy

American Scoundrel

On the last Sunday of February 1859, Dan Sickles, a charming young congressman from New York, murdered his good friend Philip Barton Key son of Francis Scott Key who was also his wife’s lover in Washington s Lafayette Square. The shooting took place directly across the street from the White House, the home of Sickles s friend and protector, President James Buchanan. Sickles turned himself in; political friends in New York s Tammany Hall machinery, including the dynamic criminal lawyer James Brady, quickly gathered around. While his beautiful young wife was banned from public life and shunned by society, Dan Sickles was acquitted. American Scoundrel is the extraordinary story of this powerful mid nineteenth century politician and inveterate womanizer, whose irresistible charms and rock solid connections not only allowed him to get away with murder literally but also paved the way to a stunning career. Once free to resume his life, Dan Sickles raised a regiment for the Union political elite and went on to become a general in the army, rising to the rank of brigadier general and commanding a flank at the Battle of Gettysburg in a maneuver so controversial it is still argued over by scholars today. After losing a leg in that battle, Sickles fought on and after the war became military governor of South Carolina, and later was named minister to Spain, where he continued astonishingly to conduct his amorous assignations. With great brio and insight and a delight in bad behavior Thomas Keneally has brought to light a tale of American history that resonates with uncomfortable truths about our politics, ethics, and morality.

Lincoln

This self made man from a log cabin the great orator, the Emancipator, the savior of the Union, the martyr was arguably our greatest president; but it takes a master storyteller like Thomas Keneally, author of the award winning novel that inspired the film Schindler’s List, to bring alive the history behind the myth. Acclaimed for his recent Civil War biography, American Scoundrel, Keneally delves with relish and a keen, fresh eye into Lincoln‘s complicated persona. Abraham Lincoln depicts all the amazing man’s triumphs, insecurities, and crushing defeats with uncanny insight: his early poverty and the ambition that propelled him out of it; the shaping of the man and his political philosophy by youthful exposure to Christianity, slavery, and business; his tempestuous marriage and his fatherly love. We see him, elected to the presidency by a twist of fate, unswerving in the grim day to day conduct of the war as his vision and acumen led the country forward. Abraham Lincoln is an incisive study of a turning point in our history and a revealing portrait of its pivotal figure, his greatness etched even more clearly in this very touching human story.

The Commonwealth of Thieves

It was 1786 when Arthur Phillip, an ambitious captain in the Royal Navy, was assigned the formidable task of organizing an expedition to Australia in order to establish a penal colony. The squalid and turbulent prisons of London were overflowing, and crime was on the rise. Even the hulks sifting at anchor in the Thames were packed with malcontent criminals and petty thieves. So the English government decided to undertake the unprecedented move of shipping off its convicts to a largely unexplored landmass at the other end of the world. Using the personal journals and documents that were kept during this expedition, historian/novelist Thomas Keneally re creates the grueling overseas voyage, a hellish, suffocating journey that claimed the lives of many convicts. Miraculously, the fleet reached the shores of what was then called New South Wales in 1788, and after much trial and error, the crew managed to set up a rudimentary yet vibrant settlement. As governor of the colony, Phillip took on the challenges of dealing with unruly convicts, disgruntled officers, a bewildered, sometimes hostile native population, as well as such serious matters as food shortages and disease. Moving beyond Phillip, Keneally offers captivating portrayals of Aborigines, who both aided and opposed Phillip, and of the settlers, including convicts who were determined to overcome their pasts and begin anew. With the authority of a renowned historian and the narrative grace of a brilliant novelist, Thomas Keneally offers an insider’s perspective into the dramatic saga of the birth of a vibrant society in an unfamiliar land. A Commonwealth of Thieves immerses us in the fledgling penal colony and conjures up colorful scenes of the joy and heartbreak, the thrills and hardships that characterized those first four improbable years. The result is a lively and engrossing work of history, as well as a tale of redemption for the thousands of convicts who started new lives thousands of miles from their homes..

Searching for Schindler

In 1980 Tom Keneally was in Beverley Hills returning from the Sorrento film festival where The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith had been showing. Looking for a new briefcase, Tom meets the Polish Jewish Leopold Pfefferberg Page aka Poldek and his life for the next few years is taken over by this charismatic and driven man and the story he wants shared. ‘It’s a story for you, I swear,’ he says to Tom. The story is of course that of ‘The all drinking, all screwing, all black marketeering Na*zi. But to me he was Jesus Christ, Oskar Schindler’. And Poldek shared with Tom the story of SCHINDLER’S ARK which went on to win the Booker Prize and ultimately to become the Oscar award winning film SCHINDLER’S LIST. Schindler, the ruined Catholic hedonist, had something ambiguous about him that appealled to the ex seminarian Tom Keneally who still struggled with his own Catholicism and his humanist view of the world. Oskar showed that virtue, regardless of race, creed or religion, emerged where it would. Tom was a small child during WWII and these memories, along with the appeal of Schindler and Poldek’s insistence, influenced him to write the book SCHINDLER’S ARK. Oskar and his Jews reduced the Holocaust an almost untellable story in its scope and devastation to an understandable human scale. Searching for Schindler is very much Tom’s journey, he reflects on his early days as a writer with quite a bit of success but no confidence and how this book, the people he met, and the film it became, changed his life. From his Sydney home, he tracked down the main player’s in Poldek and Schindler’s story. Tom and Poldek travelled across the US, Germany, Israel, Austria and Poland interviewing survivors and discovering extraordinary stories. SCHINDLER’S ARK took a huge toll on Tom, and his family, he had never been so overwhelmed by the writing of a story. It forced him to think about Australians and their attitudes to the Holocaust, to think about the Israel / Palestine situation and about families. Not ready to give up the story of Schindler and his Jews after the enormous success of the book, Tom is there for the film adaptation and on set for the filming. Filled with stories of Steven Spielberg, Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes and many other well known and strong characters Searching for Schindler gives Tom Keneally scope to show the wonderful, warm, thinking, compassionate and very funny man that he is.

Australians

The outstanding first volume of acclaimed author Thomas Keneally’s major new three volume history of Australia brings to life the vast range of characters who have formed Australia’s national story Convicts and Aborigines, settlers and soldiers, patriots and reformers, bushrangers and gold seekers it is from their lives and their stories that Tom Keneally has woven a vibrant history to do full justice to the rich and colorful nature of Australia’s unique national character. The story begins by looking at European occupation through Aboriginal eyes, moving between the city slums and rural hovels of 18th century Britain and the shores of Port Jackson. Readers spend time on the low roofed convict decks of transports and see the bewilderment of the Eora people as they see the first ships of turaga, or ‘ghost people.’ They follow the daily round of Bennelong and his wife Barangaroo and the tribulations of warrior Windradyne. Convicts like Solomon Wiseman and John Wilson find their feet and even fortune, while Henry Parkes’ arrival as a penniless immigrant gives few clues to the national statesman he was to become. Chinese diggers trek to the goldfields, and revolutionaries like Italian Raffaello Carboni and black American John Joseph bring readers the drama of the Eureka uprising. Tom Keneally has brought to life the high and the low, the convict and the free of early Australian society. This is truly a new history of Australia, by an author of outstanding literary skill and experience, whose own humanity permeates every page.

Three Famines

Famine may be triggered by nature but its outcome arises from politics and ideology. In Three Famines, award winning author Thomas Keneally uncovers the troubling truth that sustained widespread hunger is historically the outcome of government neglect and individual venality. Through the lens of three of the most disastrous famines in modern history the potato famine in Ireland, the famine in Bengal in 1943, and the string of famines that plagued Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s Keneally shows how ideology, mindsets of governments, racial preconceptions, and administrative incompetence were, ultimately, more lethal than the initiating blights or crop failures. In this compelling narrative, Keneally recounts the histories of these events while vividly evoking the terrible cost of famine at the level of the individual who starves and the nation that withers.

Australians: Eureka to the Diggers

In this companion volume of Thomas Keneally’s widely acclaimed history of the Australian people, the vast range of characters who have formed our national story are brought vividly to life. Immigrants and Aboriginal resistance figures, bushrangers and pastoralists, working men and pioneering women, artists and hard nosed radicals, politicians and soldiers all populate this richly drawn portrait of a vibrant land on the cusp of nationhood and social maturity. From the 1860s to the great rifts wrought by World War I, an era commenced in which Australians pursued glimmering visions of equity in a promised land. It was a time of social experiment and reform, of industrial radicalism and women’s rights. We were a society the world had much to learn from, or so we believed. But as much as we espoused we were a special people and celebrated a larrikin anti authoritarianism, we retained provincial objectives that saw ultimate respect for society’s structures. There was no Australian revolution. With a rich assortment of contradictory, inspiring and surprising characters, Tom Keneally brings to life the people of a young and cocky nation. This is truly a new history of Australia, by an author of outstanding literary skill and experience, and whose own humanity permeates every page.

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