My War Gone By, I Miss It So - Softcover

Anthony Loyd

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1910463167 ISBN 13: 9781910463161

Publisher: September Publishing, 2015

Synopsis

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Tom Hardy.

An extraordinary memoir of military conflict and personal battle. The first book, both 'beautiful and disturbing' (Wall Street Journal), from a young man who escaped to Bosnia in search of a vocation and excitement and later went on to become an award-winning war correspondent.

Ex-infantry officer Anthony Loyd arrived in Bosnia hoping to become a war correspondent. He left behind a damaged, distinguished military family and swapped one kind of addiction for another; drink and drugs for the adrenaline of combat. In the Balkans he became truly embedded - both appalled and involved - by the war's cruel chaos.

In the midst of the daily life-and-death struggle among the Serbs, Croatians and Bosnian Muslims he was inspired by the extraordinary human fortitude he discovered. But returning home, empty and craving adrenaline, he would face his own frailties until he could bear it no longer.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So is a uniquely powerful piece of writing, unparalleled in the genre. A compassionate, visceral record of conflict; a brutally honest account of war's exhilarations and more personal battlegrounds.

About this title

Review:

Anthony Loyd's first book is a vivid, haunting account of the war in Bosnia from 1993 until 1996, from where he reported for the Daily Telegraph and then the Times as a special correspondent. However, what separates it from standard reportage is the war Loyd was fighting on a personal front, which drove him to seek war as a "final absolution of self-responsibility". While snipers shot people indiscriminately Loyd, living on whisky-chased adrenaline, fought to understand the compulsion he felt to be there and struggled to shoot the pictures that were the pretext for his presence. It is this battle, set against the brutality that tore the Balkans to shreds, that gives the book its anguished focus and embattled majesty.

Loyd gradually reveals a fractured upbringing, which culminated in the death of the father from whom he had been torturously distant for many years. Five years in the army did little to relieve the embittered emotional hangover that had become his burden, and in indulging the impulse that propelled him to war he was following in the footsteps of generations of males in his family. In addition to the stimulation engendered he was also fighting a heroin dependency that reared up when the buzz of the danger passed.

The descriptions of mortar-damaged flesh in Bosnia do not depart easily from the consciousness of the reader, who is left shuddering at the damage they must have inflicted on the author. Loyd, though, free from the constraints of newspaper journalism, writes with an angrily articulate physicality that throbs with a challenging compassion one longs for him to apply to himself. He finally achieves a redemption of sorts, and in the process has written one of the most uncompromising and personally honest accounts of the ugliness of war that puts to shame complacent apathy. Brave, provocative, essential, but not for those who take cream in their coffee. --David Vincent

Review:

'An extraordinary memoir of the Bosnian War ... savage and mercilessly readable ... deserves a place alongside George Orwell, James Cameron and Nicholas Tomalin. It is as good as war reporting gets. I have nowhere read a more vivid account of frontline fear and survival. Forget the strategic overview. All war is local. It is about the ditch in which the soldier crouches and the ground on which he fights and maybe dies. The same applies to the war reporter. Anthony Loyd has been there and knows it' --Martin Bell, The Times

'A truly exceptional book, one of those rare moments in journalistic writing when you can sit back and realise that you are in the presence of somebody willing to take the supreme risk for a writer, of extending their inner self. I finished reading Anthony Loyd's account of his time in the Balkans and Chechnya only a few days ago and am still feeling the after-effects ... I read his story of war and addiction (to conflict and heroin) with a sense of gratitude for the honesty and courage on every page' --Fergal Keane, Independent

'Not since Michael Herr wrote Dispatches has any journalist written so persuasively about violence and its seductions in all of war's minutiae of awful detail ... an account that demystifies war and the war reporter and strips them bare before the reader' --Peter Beaumont, Observer

'Undoubtedly the most powerful and immediate book to emerge from the Balkan horror of ethnic civil war ... far more revealing and convincing than anything recounted to camera by visiting journalists and politicians' --Antony Beevor, Daily Telegraph

'An astonishing book ... a raw, vivid and brutally honest account of his transition from thrill seeker to concerned reporter' --Philip Jacobson, Daily Mail

'Chilling ... a true picture into the brutality of war and should be required reading for all those politicians who use phrases such as "collateral damage" and "surgical strikes"' --John Nichol, Daily Express

'Both beautiful and disturbing' --Wall Street Journal

'Part war memoir, part coming-of-age tale and part junkie diary, it's a raw account of the hypnotic lures of violence, heroin and danger' --Carla Power, Newsweek

'This is more than just despatches from the front. There's bloodred-vivid descriptions of the fighting, sure, but there's also the dark poetic insight of a man who's seen humanity at its worst. Loyd spares us nothing - not brains spilling out on the street, not his own bleak despair, not even the jokes - and he deserves a medal for it' --Maxim

'Magnificent ... a stench of blood, excrement, mortar-fire, slivovitz and human bestiality emanates from these pages' --Ben Shephard, Literary Review

'Battlefield reportage does not get more up close, gruesome, and personal ... The fear and confusion of battle are so vivid that in places, they rise like acrid smoke from the page' --New York Times

'Loyd's strongest writing is in his descriptions of carnage - of the sound and smell of shellfire; of the sexual release of blasting away with an automatic machine gun ... This is pure war reporting, free from the usual journalistic constraints that often give a false significance to suffering. And Loyd waxes eloquent on the backblast of his war time, a heroin addiction that begins before his arrival and becomes the only way he can survive his breaks from the fighting' --Salon

'First-rate war correspondence ... [in] the great tradition of Hemingway, Caputo, and Michael Herr' --Boston Globe

'My War Gone By, I Miss It So moves at the pace of a thriller. Why bother reading war fiction when you can read such intense reporting?' --LA Weekly

'[Loyd] has written an account of its horrors that will wipe out any thoughts you might have had that we have reached the limit of the worst human nature has to offer. The monstrosities he describes are beyond belief. But the book is also compelling for what it tells us about fear' --National Geographic Adventure

'A testament to his honor and courage. And while it would be impossible for one man to tell the whole story, his book shines with small truths and larger, philosophical ones about life and war' --New York Post

'My War Gone By is a brutal yet sensitive story which addresses both the nature of addiction and the experience of war. I was struck by Anthony's work and words, experiences, and for me his is an important voice and an important book.' --Tom Hardy

About this edition

• Publisher: September Publishing
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1910463167
• ISBN 13: 9781910463161
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 334