How hard it it to kill, as a hunter on a Kangaroo cull, as a worker in an abbatoir, as an executioner in a prison, as a soldier at war?

Ninety years after World War I, police in a Victorian country town uncover the mummified head of a Turkish soldier, a bullet-ridden souvenir brought home from Gallipoli by a returning ANZAC.

The macabre discovery sets Jeff Sparrow on a quest to understand the nature of deadly violence. How do ordinary people-whether in today's wars or in 1915-learn to take a human life? How do they live with the aftermath?

These questions lead Sparrow through history and across Australia and the USA, talking to veterans and slaughtermen, executioners and writers about one of the last remaining taboos.

Compassionate, engaged and political, Killing takes us up close to the ways society kills today, meditating on what violence means, not just for perpetrators but for all of us.

Jeff Sparrow is the co-author of Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within, and the author of Communism: A Love Story, which was shortlisted for the 2007 Colin Roderick Award. He is the editor of the Australian literary journal Overland and writes regularly for Crikey. He lives in Melbourne.

Read Jo Case's interview with Jeff Sparrow about Killing.