Category: Books

Publisher’s Description:’For years, those who attempted to understand the devastation of World War I looked to the collections of diplomatic documents, the stirring speeches, and the partisan memoirs of the leading participants. However, those accounts offered little by way of the intimate history, or the individual experiences of those involved in the Great War. In Commitment and Sacrifice, Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee and Frans Coetzee provide just such an intimate look by bringing together previously unpublished diaries of five participants in the First World War and restoring to publication the diary of a sixth that has long been out of print.’

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Publisher’s Description:’World War I was a slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Nevertheless there was no shortage of young men willing to sacrifice themselves for their country. Some lied about their age to join up, not just at the start of the war when it was seen as a glorious adventure, but even towards the end when the true horror of the mechanized butchery was known to one and all. This book concerns the young men who were not yet twenty when they won the Victoria Cross, the British armed forces highest award for gallantry.’

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Publisher’s Description:’The Monocled Mutineer became a national sensation when it was made into an acclaimed, and controversial, BBC drama in 1986, starring Paul McGann. The Monocled Mutineer asks: was Percy Toplis an anti-establishment hero? What made the monocled mutineer the most wanted man in Britain?’

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Centenary News Review:It’s quite a rare thing for a First World War novel to surprise me. We see the same tropes – the mud soaked trenches, lice, death, ignorance – in the majority, whether that’s in the novels of the 20s and 30s written by those who experienced it, or in modern novels where all too often the ‘expected’ imagery is shoehorned in around a central plot. Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear however, is quite different.

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Publisher’s Description:’From 25th April 1915 to 9th January 1916, troops from Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Turkey engaged in a bitter struggle for the Gallipoli peninsula. The Allied forces wanted to forge a passage through the Dardanelles in order to create a sea route to Russia and capture the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. Despite having more troops and being better supplied, the Allies suffered devastating losses in the face of the brave and resourceful Turks. Gallipoli tells the story of this campaign in a unique and comprehensive manner, through three authors who expertly describe their country’s role and the impact the conflict had.’

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Publisher’s Description:’The vivid story of the young Americans who fought and died in the aerial battles of World War IThe Unsubstantial Air is a chronicle of war that is more than a military history; it traces the lives and deaths of the young Americans who fought in the skies over Europe in World War I. Using letters, journals, and memoirs, it speaks in their voices and answers primal questions: What was it like to be there? What was it like to fly those planes, to fight, to kill?’

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Publisher’s Description:’Young officer John Hilliard returns to his battalion in France following a period of sick leave in England. Despite having trouble adjusting to all the new faces, the stiff and reserved Hilliard forms a friendship with David Barton, an open and cheerful new recruit who has still to be bloodied in battle. As the pair approach the front line, to the proximity of death and destruction, their strange friendship deepens. But each knows that soon they will be separated.’

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Publisher’s Description:’Edward Lynch enlisted when he was just 18 – one of thousands of fresh-faced men who were proudly waved off by the crowds as they embarked for France. It was 1916 and the majority had no idea of the reality of the Somme trenches, of the traumatised soldiers they would encounter there, of the innumerable, awful contradictions of war. Private Lynch was one of those who survived, and on his return home, wrote Somme Mud in pencil in over 20 school exercise books, perhaps in the hope of coming to terms with all that he had witnessed there?’

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Publisher’s Description:’In 1914 Paris half the city expects war while the other half scoffs at the possibility. During the years that follow, three generations of women come together to cope with deprivation, fear and the dreadful impacts of war.’

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