My Life as a Foreign Country - Hardcover

Turner, Brian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224097431 ISBN 13: 9780224097437

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2014

Synopsis

In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner was at the head of a convoy of 3,500 soldiers as they entered the Iraqi desert. Ten years later, he lies awake beside his sleeping wife, hallucinating: he is a drone aircraft. He hovers over a landscape in which the terrains of every conflict, of Bosnia and Vietnam, Iraq and Northern Ireland, the killing fields of Cambodia and the death camps of Europe, are pressed together, and the violence is ongoing. The hallucination recurs, and every night Sergeant Turner is forced to observe anew all that man has done to man. My Life as a Foreign Country follows the experience of one soldier in one recent war - the preparations, actions, homecomings and infinite aftermath - but then explodes from those narrow limits. Unburdened by nostalgia, hollow sympathy or a journalistic hunger for fact, this account combines the recalled with the imagined, and leaps centuries and continents to seek parallels in the histories of other men. The result is an opportunity to enter the head of a man still stalked by war, to experience conflict with new definition and lasting effect.

About this title

Review:

"Brian Turner's stunning 'war memoir' is a triumph of form and content...Man must look at what he has done. And Turner looks, brilliantly" (Jen Percy New York Times)

"[Turner is] a soldier with the soul of a poet...remarkable" (Daily Telegraph)

"Wrathful, wry and incantatory" (Erica Wagner New Statesman)

"Ambitious... Fascinating" (Sunday Times)

"His shrapnel-like chapters come at you from all angles... [A] most compulsive of survivor’s tales" (Guardian)

Book Description:

'My Life as a Foreign Country is brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered - a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature.' Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0224097431
• ISBN 13: 9780224097437
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240