Gallipoli: Centenary edition

Description

The definitive work and national bestseller "The book of the year" Alan Ramsey, Sydney Morning Herald Les Carlyon's Gallipoli is the epic story of the fighting men who forged the legend of Anzac in 1915. Taking the reader behind the lines and into the trenches, Gallipoli not only brings an infamous battlefield to vivid life but puts poignant breath in the bones of the ordinary heroes who lived and died there. War stories are rarely this personal but Carlton's meticulous research and mesmeric storytelling take readers up-close with the conflict like never before, poetically evoking an ancient landscape rooted in myth, a theatre for Alexander the Great, St Paul and the Trojan Wars, and then intimately populating it with soldiers, generals and politicians from the Allied and Turkish forces. A century on from the Anzac landing on 25 April 1915, Les Carlyon's Gallipoli endures, a masterpiece every bit as haunting and heartbreaking as the events it records. Once read, it is never forgotten.

Les Carlyon, AC, was born in northern Victoria in 1942. He was an editor of The Age, editor-in-chief of the Herald & Weekly Times, and the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year in 1993. Gallipoli was published in 2001 to vast critical and commercial success and became a number one best-seller in Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain. Acclaimed worldwide as a landmark chapter in histories of the First World War, it is now considered the definitive account of the campaign. The book's best-selling sequel, The Great War, was published in 2006 to widespread critical praise. Carlyon's other books for Pan Macmillan include The Master: A Personal Portrait of Bart Cummings.