The Missing of the Somme

Description

The Missing of the Somme has become a classic meditation upon war and remembrance. It weaves a network of myth and memory, photos and films, poetry and sculptures, graveyards and ceremonies that illuminate our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War.

Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as ten non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E.M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ's Writer of the Year. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and was a finalist in 1998. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in London.

The great Great War book of our time * * Observer * * Articulates a response to the Great War which many feel, but no one has analysed so scrupulously * * Spectator * * A penetrating meditation upon war and remembrance * * Daily Telegraph * * Dyer is excellent on the different ambitions and effects of municipal memorials, and on photographs and paintings -- Sebastian Faulks * * Mail on Sunday * * A gentle, patient, loving book. It is about mourning and memory, about how the Great War has been represented - and our sense of it shaped and defined - by different artistic media * * Guardian * *