The Great War Centenary edition
Carlyon, Les

RRP
A$39.99

The Great War is long ago and far away. And in the clay that is soft and springy under your feet at Boesinghe it is still with us, loaded with mysteries and heavy with sadness and thoughts of things that are unspeakable. All the Australians who fought on the western front are gone now. There were so many of them, and we never really saw them.

Les Carlyon's The Great War is the epic story of the fighting men who found themselves on the western front as part of the largest tragedy in Australian history - over 216,000 dead and wounded.

With a novelist's eye for detail and anecdote, Carlyon takes us into the maelstrom of their world. The Great War presents history as a powerful narrative that shifts effortlessly from the political salons of London and Saint Petersburg to the blood-soaked trenches of Pozières and Passchendaele.

Having walked the fields of France, Belgium and Turkey himself, Carlyon recreates these hellish landscapes and uses meticulous research and mesmerising storytelling to describe the grand strategies of the military leaders on both sides while never losing sight o the ordinary soldiers caught up in the first big war of the industrial age, a war that turned out as no one ever imagined.

A century on from the first shot of WWI, The Great War endures as the most brilliant account of what is still the major event of Australia's military history.

Author Information

Les Carlyon, AC, was born in northern Victoria in 1942. He was an editor of The Age, editor-in-chief of the Herald & Weekly Times, and the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year in 1993. Gallipoli was published in 2001 to vast critical and commercial success and became a number one best-seller in Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain. Acclaimed worldwide as a landmark chapter in histories of the First World War, it is now considered the definitive account of the campaign. The book's best-selling sequel, The Great War, was published in 2006 to widespread critical praise. Carlyon's other books for Pan Macmillan include The Master: A Personal Portrait of Bart Cummings.