A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War

A profound, moving and important collection of letters, diaries and memories of the First World War, edited by Sebastian Faulks - author of Birdsong - and Dr Hope Wolf.

A Broken World presents a cacophony of voices from and about the Great War in a way never before collected together, telling the story of the conflict and its aftermath through memories and stories assembled by place and landscape.
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Sebastian Faulks and Hope Wolf have explored archives and autobiographical records to select true-life stories and experiences from diaries, letters, postcards, memoirs and other remembrances of this terrible conflict and its aftermath.
When thinking about the First World War, images of trenches, no man's land, ruined towns, and fields of white crosses have endured. This collection will include memories from and about these places, but will also feature writing from less familiar environments: voices from deserts, air space and seascapes will jostle alongside war stories from hospitals, railways, monumnets, churches, theatres, factories, prison camps and the home.
As Sebastian Faulks says: 'Much of the most exciting and illuminating writing on the First World War is found in private, unpublished documents. Some little-known or out-of-print published works also have important things to say. The centenary is the right time to shake up our received ideas of those four years. This anthology hopes to give a hearing to a Babel of urgent but little-known voices and to guide the reader through them to a deeper understanding.'