'My story is the story of my brother, Billy.' Neil stared down at the table, momentarily lost for words. When they finally came, his friends had to strain to hear him. 'It is my family's darkest secret. If the secret is to be revealed, unfortunately, I am the one obliged to do it.' 'Why? Why you?' asked Lucio. 'Because I took my brother's life.' Once again, four friends gather to share lunch and their mutual passion for storytelling. this time it is Neil's turn, and this time the story will be distinctively Australian. A bitter critic of his friends' insistence on telling true stories, Neil reluctantly challenges them with a true story of his own. He protests that they left him no choice, claiming that fiction can never compete with truth and that the baring of his shame is a consequence. His shocking admission is the first of many shocks in a story that begins in the desperate, red-ridge country of north-west New South Wales, when a city woman rents a disused house in an isolated corner of Billy's vast grazing property. She is beautiful, worldly and out of place. She is also on the run. Both she and Billy have dark secrets which take readers into the country's toughest prisons, the opal mines of the Grawin and war-torn Vietnam. It is a story in which truth is never constant and friendships are tested to the limit.

Americans eat more processed foods than anyone else in the world. We also spend more on military research. These two seemingly unrelated facts are inextricably linked. If you ever wondered how ready-to-eat foods infiltrated your kitchen, you’ll love this entertaining romp through the secret military history of practically everything you buy at the supermarket. In a nondescript Boston suburb, in a handful of low buildings buffered by trees and a lake, a group of men and women spend their days researching, testing, tasting, and producing the foods that form the bedrock of the American diet. If you stumbled into the facility, you might think the technicians dressed in lab coats and the shiny kitchen equipment belonged to one of the giant food conglomerates responsible for your favorite brand of frozen pizza or microwavable breakfast burritos. So you’d be surprised to learn that you’ve just entered the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, ground zero for the processed food industry. Ever since Napoleon, armies have sought better ways to preserve, store, and transport food for battle. As part of this quest, although most people don’t realize it, the U.S. military spearheaded the invention of energy bars, restructured meat, extended-life bread, instant coffee, and much more. But there’s been an insidious mission creep: because the military enlisted industry—huge corporations such as ADM, ConAgra, General Mills, Hershey, Hormel, Mars, Nabisco, Reynolds, Smithfield, Swift, Tyson, and Unilever—to help develop and manufacture food for soldiers on the front line, over the years combat rations, or the key technologies used in engineering them, have ended up dominating grocery store shelves and refrigerator cases. TV dinners, the cheese powder in snack foods, cling wrap . . . The list is almost endless. Now food writer Anastacia Marx de Salcedo scrutinizes the world of processed food and its long relationship with the military—unveiling the twists, turns, successes, failures, and products that have found their way from the armed forces’ and contractors’ laboratories into our kitchens. In developing these rations, the army was looking for some of the very same qualities as we do in our hectic, fast-paced twenty-first-century lives: portability, ease of preparation, extended shelf life at room temperature, affordability, and appeal to even the least adventurous eaters. In other words, the military has us chowing down like special ops. What is the effect of such a diet, eaten—as it is by soldiers and most consumers—day in and day out, year after year? We don’t really know. We’re the guinea pigs in a giant public health experiment, one in which science and technology, at the beck and call of the military, have taken over our kitchens.

Celebrating 10 years of Lunch with Derek Hansen - a new edition of his bestselling first Lunch novel. Ramon, self-styled master storyteller, has steered his listeners down a sinister path littered with love and betrayal, secret police and death squads. But as the Argentinian's tale nears its startling conclusion, his audience is struck with horror at the possibility that Ramon's clever invention is nothing more than the cunningly disguised chronicle of his own shadowy past. Is Ramon a gifted artist of the imagination or the perpetrator of a terrible act of revenge that defies all forgiveness? 'Hansen is a great novelist. Only the bravest and most confident writer could grant his characters such intelligence and insight and still remain in command' - West Australian.

the bestselling author of Sole Survivor, Lunch with the Generals and Lunch with Mussolini returns with a gripping new novel that crosses decades and continents.Derek Hansen takes us back to Gancio\'9291s restaurant. It is a thursday and, as usual, Ramon, Lucio, Milos and Neil have gathered for their weekly lunch appointment. It is Neil\'9291s turn to take the floor - except that Milos steps in and demands to tell his story. He has no choice in the matter, he says, \'9291this story has already been too long awaiting the telling. It is not just an obligation but a repayment of a debt.\'9291 With those words he hooks the three other men - and Derek Hansen hooks his readers. We are taken back to Hungary in the 1940s, a time when Jews are persecuted and rumours of the terrifying death camps are already circulating. this is a novel with huge range, set within a real historical landscape populated by figures like Adolf Eichmann and the Russian and Hungarian secret police. It is also the story of two brothers who vie for the affections of the same girl during a time of turmoil and separation, a story which begins in Hungary and seeks its conclusion in Australia. two boys who are forced to deal, steal and kill to survive.

Celebrating 10 years of Lunch with Derek Hansen - a new edition of his bestselling second Lunch novel. Spring 1945: the quiet of a northern Italian village is shattered by an explosion of gunfire as eight innocent women are gunned down. Why have they been executed now, with the war almost over and the Germans standing to gain nothing from further reprisals? Fifty years later the daughter of one of the victims finds the German officer who ordered the executions living under an assumed name, and sets out to avenge her mother's death. 'It is no coincidence that two great novels linked with the Second World War have come out of Australia.Keneally's Schindler's Ark and now Derek Hansen's Lunch with Mussolini' - Glasgow Herald. '.as brilliant technically as it is profound thematically' - Canberra times.