Four devastating years told by twenty eyewitnesses showing not just what the First World War was, but what it was like to live through

There are many books on the First World War, but award-winning and bestselling historian Peter Englund takes a daring and stunning new approach. Describing the experiences of twenty ordinary people from around the world, all now unknown, he explores the everyday aspects of war: not only the tragedy and horror, but also the absurdity, monotony and even beauty. Two of these twenty will perish, two will become prisoners of war, two will become celebrated heroes and two others end up as physical wrecks. One of them goes mad, another will never hear a shot fired. Following soldiers and sailors, nurses and government workers, from Britain, Russia, Germany, Australia and South America - and in theatres of war often neglected by major histories on the period - Englund reconstructs their feelings, impressions, experiences and moods. This is a piece of anti-history: it brings this epoch-making event back to its smallest component, the individual.

"Extraordinary ... a work of magnificent, elegiac seriousness" - Guardian

"He conjures up the atmosphere over and over again with just a few stark words. I loved all the detail... inspiring." - Margaret Forster

"By turns pithy, lyrical, colourful, poignant and endlessly absorbing. An exquisite book." - Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"A brilliant feat of retrospective journalism" - Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Intense and bighearted . . . Englund's volume joins an unconventional pantheon . . . The accounts of [these] lives can be terrifying or stirring, but are most fully alive in Englund's accumulation of small moments, stray details . . . His book has the most devastating ending I can remember in a piece of nonfiction." - New York Times