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.

'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.

An essential American novel from Sandra Dallas, an unparalleled writer of our history, and our deepest emotions... During World War II, a family finds life turned upside down when the government opens a Japanese internment camp in their small Colorado town. After a young girl is murdered, all eyes (and suspicions) turn to the newcomers, the interlopers, the strangers. This is Tallgrass as Rennie Stroud has never seen it before. She has just turned thirteen and, until this time, life has pretty much been what her father told her it should be: predictable and fair. But now the winds of change are coming and, with them, a shift in her perspective. And Rennie will discover secrets that can destroy even the most sacred things. Part thriller, part historical novel, Tallgrass is a riveting exploration of the darkest--and best--parts of the human heart.

From the bestselling author of SOLE SURVIVOR comes a story of loss of innocence and unexpected repercussions of war ... It began innocently ... It destroyed innocence forever. When a twelve-year-old boy writes an essay and inadvertently uncovers a wartime secret, he unleashes a chain of events which rips a close community apart, turning neighbour against neighbour, friend against friend. It is Auckland, 1956. While the country has been spared the destruction which ravaged Europe and Asia, beneath the surface bitter memories and old enmities run deep. the war may be over but, as the boy discovers, it is far from done with.In a poignant and gripping tale of events which challenge and define a post-war community, master storyteller Derek Hansen superbly captures the spirit of inner city life in the mid-fifties, when migrants and war survivors came to a land of peace and the promise of a new life - only to have it challenged in unexpected and life-changing ways. Derek Hansen has an uncanny knack for bringing back the substance and subtleties of the times and places about which he writes. In this instance, having been raised in Auckland in the 1950s, his eye is unerring.'Ripping yarn builds to an enthralling climax' tHE PRESS

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.

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.

It is September 1939. Shortly after war is declared, Anthony Rhodes is sent to France, serving with the British Army. His days are filled with the minutiae and mundanities of Army life – friendships, billeting, administration – as the months of the ‘Phoney War’ quickly pass and the conflict seems a distant prospect. It is only in the spring of 1940 that the true situation becomes clear; the men are ordered to retreat to the coast and the beaches of Dunkirk, where they face a desperate and terrifying wait for evacuation.