The First of July - Softcover

This well-told, well-plotted war epic from British novelist Speller tracks the life experiences of four disparate Allied soldiers fighting in the bloody Battle of the Somme. The stark battlefield scenes evoke Hemingwayesque realism in Speller's unsentimental, always engaging literary war narrative. "

Utterly gripping and completely immersing. As the war progresses, the soldier's stories converge in a pointillist portrait of the trench-riddled landscape and those upon whose frail shoulders the battle depends. Gritty, disturbing, moody, and intensely real, the novel s psychological impact is like those of Mary Doria Russell s A Thread of Grace and Denis Johnson s Tree of Smoke and asks readers to consider war s high costs. Great book-club fare. "

Speller combines a Ruth Rendell-like psychological realism and a Dickensian feel for life's roulette. "