Cirrus@Austlit

'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.'

Source: publisher's blurb (HarperCollins)

'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.'

Source: publisher's blurb

'Derek Hansen's latest addition to his bestselling Lunch series. Once again Ramon, Lucio, Milos and Neil gather at Gancio's restaurant to share lunch and their mutual passion for storytelling. It is Neil's turn to take to the floor but instead Milos demands the right to take precedence. He has no choice, he says, his story has already been too long awaiting the telling. As the story unfolds his friends are horrified to learn the reason for his urgency. this is a novel with a huge range and scope, set within a real historical landscape populated by figures like Adolf Eichmann and the Hungarian and Russian secret police; a story of survival which begins in Hungary but seeks its conclusion in Australia.'

Source: publisher's blurb

''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.'

Source: publisher's blurb