Free Lunch is the story of Rex Ogle's first term in Year 7. Rex and his baby brother often went hungry, wore second-hand clothes and were short of school supplies, and Ogle was on his school's free lunch programme. Grounded in the immediacy of physical hunger and the humiliation of having to announce it every day in the school lunch line, Ogle's is a compelling story of a more profound hunger-that of a child for his parents' love and care.

Compulsively readable, beautifully crafted and authentically told with the voice and point of view of an eleven-year-old child, Free Lunch is a remarkable debut by a gifted storyteller.