The Twenty Thousand Thieves
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: Chipped, torn with minor damage. Page Condition: Yellowed. Markings: Previous owner — bookplate present on title page (Les Glover). Binding condition: Binding intact.
The Twenty Thousand Thieves plunges readers into the brutal theatre of World War II, following Australian soldiers — the irreverent, hard-bitten men of the 2/48th Battalion — through the harrowing North African campaign at Tobruk and El Alamein. Eric Lambert chronicles their camaraderie, survival, and moral reckoning with unflinching realism, capturing the larrikin spirit of the Digger against a backdrop of desert warfare, deprivation, and death. The novel presents not glory, but the grinding, unglamorous truth of men at war — men who steal, endure, and persist simply because there is no alternative. Lambert's debut, drawn from his own wartime experience as an Australian soldier, stands as a landmark of mid-twentieth-century Australian literature. His prose is spare yet electric, grounding grand historical conflict in the intimate voices of ordinary men. The result is a novel that argues, quietly but powerfully, that heroism and criminality are separated by little more than circumstance — a question that lingers long after the last page is turned.
Author: Eric Lambert
Format: Hardback
Published: 1951, Newmont Melbourne
Genre: Historical fiction
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: Chipped, torn with minor damage. Page Condition: Yellowed. Markings: Previous owner — bookplate present on title page (Les Glover). Binding condition: Binding intact.
The Twenty Thousand Thieves plunges readers into the brutal theatre of World War II, following Australian soldiers — the irreverent, hard-bitten men of the 2/48th Battalion — through the harrowing North African campaign at Tobruk and El Alamein. Eric Lambert chronicles their camaraderie, survival, and moral reckoning with unflinching realism, capturing the larrikin spirit of the Digger against a backdrop of desert warfare, deprivation, and death. The novel presents not glory, but the grinding, unglamorous truth of men at war — men who steal, endure, and persist simply because there is no alternative. Lambert's debut, drawn from his own wartime experience as an Australian soldier, stands as a landmark of mid-twentieth-century Australian literature. His prose is spare yet electric, grounding grand historical conflict in the intimate voices of ordinary men. The result is a novel that argues, quietly but powerfully, that heroism and criminality are separated by little more than circumstance — a question that lingers long after the last page is turned.