Cassie Hamer in conversation with Sandie Docker

Join us for a night celebrating the release of Cassie Hamer's The Stranger at the Table.

Cassie Hamer has a professional background in journalism and PR, but now much prefers the world of fiction over fact. She is the author of three novels, including the Australian bestseller After the Party, and her stories focus on ordinary characters who find themselves in extraordinary situations. Cassie lives on Gadigal Country in Sydney with her terrific husband, three mostly terrific daughters, and a labradoodle, Charlie, who is the least demanding family member.


Sandie Docker is an internationally published author of contemporary women’s fiction, known for her heartwarming stories about love, loss, family, and small-town life. Her novels include The Kookaburra Creek Café, The Cottage at Rosella Cove, The Banksia Bay Beach Shack, The Wattle Island Book Club, The Redgum River Retreat, and The Lyrebird Lake Ladies Choir. Sandie is also the founder and director of The Northern Beaches Readers Festival.


About The Stranger at the Table:
Maz Antonio has spent the last two years in prison so is determined to make the first major family gathering in their new home deep in Australian suburbia as perfect as possible. She owes it to everyone after the terrible mistakes she's made ... mistakes for which she will always be trying to atone. This special lunch is her chance to make things right for her husband and children, to show everyone that she can maintain her sobriety, that things can go back to normal. (Whatever normal looks like when you have traumatic, confusing flashbacks of that fateful day where two innocent lives were lost.)

Her sister, Elli, is in. So is her husband's brother. Her distant father-in-law is gracing them with his presence and her mum Margaret is on the way from Newcastle, bringing a colleague - a virtual stranger she impulsively invited.

But is this man really a stranger? Or could it be that he is intimately connected to the past that Maz has so desperately been trying to put behind her - a past that's about to explode across the dinner table in the deadliest of ways...