Lunch with Mussolini

Book excerpt: 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.