No Man's Land: Fiction from a World at War: 1914-1918 - Softcover

Handsomely produced and aptly titled. The impressive number of other nationalities and other fronts it represents is unusual. Pete Ayrton's volume will undoubtedly send people in search of the books from which he has drawn such enticing extracts. Marvelous.

Ayrton has achieved something very rare and powerful in this book, a brilliantly edited collection of fiction. Essential reading for anyone interested in history, literature, or the human condition.

Harrowing but brilliant accounts of the human cost of war. In all its calculated costs of cruelty, its human impact, its formidable weapons of death and destruction and - yes - its futility, is captured brilliantly in this remarkable, wide-ranging anthology.

You'll find war celebrities like Siegfried Sassoon and Erich Maria Remarque, but also Greeks, Turks, Czechs and Indians with names like Prezihov Voranc, Emilio Lussu, Mulk Raj Anand and Josep Pla.

The Great War gave birth to some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated writing; from D. H. Lawrence to Siegfried Sassoon, the literature generated by the war is etched into collective memory. But it is in fiction that we find some of the most profound insights into the war’s individual and communal tragedies, the horror of life in the trenches, and the grand farce of the first industrial war.Featuring forty-seven writers from twenty different nations, representing all the main participants in the conflict, No Man’s Land is a truly international anthology of World War I fiction. Work by Erich Maria Remarque, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Rose Macaulay sits alongside forgotten masterpieces such as Stratis Myrivilis’s Life in the Tomb, Raymond Escholier’s Mahmadou Fofana, and Mary Borden’s The ForbiddenZone.No Man’s Land is a brilliant memorial to the twentieth century’s most cataclysmic event.