Winner of the 2001 Miles Franklin Award this book was published seven years after Grand Days. Dark Palace takes us back to Geneva, pre-World War II where Edith’s marriage to the journalist Robert Dole is slowly unravelling. Edith is despondent that the League’s efforts to bring about disarmament and to exercise sanctions against Mussolini’s Italy are also failing. Hitler’s power is growing inexorably. What’s more Edith’s drinking has been “mentioned” among her colleagues and she is infuriated by their implications.

The return of Ambrose Westwood brings some joy to her life and as she is distancing her husband Edith brings Ambrose into her apartment and they resume their unconventional relationship.

When Edith decides to take home leave she returns to Australia to visit her elderly father, see old friends and make tentative approaches to the Department of External Affairs in Canberra.

Edith is discomforted in Australia. She finds the bush “sharp, brittle, gnarled and dry...It had always been difficult to find a comfortable place to sit in the bush.” (p264) Canberra “is a couple of buildings in a paddock” (p131). Her friends challenge her recollections of her university life and she is dismayed by the course their lives have taken.

When she returns to Geneva it is to find the League is dismantling in the face of war. Staff are leaving to return to their homes; departments are relocating to safer locations and only a skeleton staff remains to work on statistical reports. The League is now so immaterial to the war that when Edith and Ambrose find out from a Nazi defector that Hitler is building extermination camps, Edith reports the information directly to Eden in Churchill’s government rather than to her own superior. At the deserted Palais Edith looks that the murals that embody the League’s goals – “The End of Pestilence: Strength: Law: The End of Slavery: Solidarity of Peoples: The End of War” and reflects that the murals, and the values, are now “unseen and unbelieved”...”tied up like hungry pets”. (p568)

As we know the League is dismantled at the end of the war and its property given to the newly formed United Nations. Edith and her colleagues are deemed dispensable and the book closes and with Edith and Ambrose digesting this surprising news in a  hotel room in San Fransisco.

Moorhouse takes us through this turbulent period of 20^th century history telling the story not with hindsight, but with the incidents and manoeuvrings unfolding and coalescing around the characters in the confusing and conflicting chaos of real time. The altruistic Edith of Grand Days has developed into a pragmatic and experienced operator.  The imperturbable Ambrose has been wrong-footed. And the book closes leaving us wondering how these two fascinating survivors will manage in the emerging new world order.