Ice-cream War - Hardcover

Boyd, William

3.9

4,041 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241108683 ISBN 13: 9780241108680

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1982

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Physical description; 370 p. ; 23 cm. Subjects; World War, 1914-1918 - Africa, East - Social aspects - Fiction. World War, 1914-1918 - Social aspects - Africa, East - Fiction.

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About the Author:

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana and grew up there and in Nigeria. His first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize. His other novels include An Ice Cream War (1982, shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Stars and Bars (1984), The New Confessions (1987), Brazzaville Beach (1990, winner of the McVitie Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), The Blue Afternoon (1993, winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award), Armadillo (1998), Any Human Heart (2002, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet) and Restless (2006, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award). His latest novel is Sweet Caress (2015). Some seventeen of his screenplays have been filmed, including The Trench (1999), which he also directed, and he is also the author of four collections of short stories: On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' (1995), Fascination (2004) and The Dream Lover (2008). He is married and divides his time between London and South West France.

From the Back Cover:

'As ambitious as it is remarkable. Balances on seesaws of innocence and violence, sanity and lunacy, hilarity and horror' The Times

'We will all melt like ice-cream in the sun!'
British soldier, East Africa, 1914

On the Western Front millions are being slaughtered. But in East Africa a ridiculous and utterly ignored campaign is being waged - one that continues after the Armistice because no one bothers to tell the participants to stop.

As millions are swept up in the conflict, An Ice-Cream War contrasts the fortunes of those languishing at home with those fighting abroad swept up in the passions of battlefield and bed chamber, while history makes up its mind whether events shall be played either as tragedy or comedy.

'A towering achievement' John Carey

'Compulsively readable' Blake Morrison, Observer

'Funny, assured, a seriocomic romp. A study of people caught in the side pockets of calamity that dramatizes their plights with humour, detail and grit' Harper's

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