Featured on The TV Book Club on More4 on 30 Jan 2011.
The Junior Officers' Reading Club is the story of one soldier's experiences in the modern British Army. From the testosterone-heavy training of Sandhurst, into the war-pockmarked, gritty Balkans, out into the nightmare of Iraq and Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. Written in spare and lucid prose, it describes with alarming vividness the frenetic violence of a soldier’s life, and the periods of stifling boredom. This is a very relevant account of a contemporary Army caught between a world that needs it and a society that no longer understands it.
The Junior Officers' Reading Club : Killing Time and Fighting Wars Synopsis
Patrick Hennessey's The Junior Officers' Reading Club is a lucid, witty account of all the horror, boredom and exhilaration of war.
Patrick Hennessey is pretty much like any other member of Generation X: he spent the first half of the noughties reading books at university, going out, listening to house music and watching war films. He also, as an officer in the Grenadier guards, fought in some of the most violent combat the British army has seen in decades.
Telling the story of how a modern soldier is made, from the testosterone-heavy breeding ground of Sandhurst to the nightmare of Iraq and Afghanistan, The Junior Officers' Reading Club is already being hailed as a modern classic.
"Soldiers who can write are as rare as writers who can strip down a machinegun in 40 seconds, but Patrick Hennessey is one of the few" Sunday Times
"High-tempo, full-on ... honest and revealing ... a memoir brimming with vinegar and testosterone" Evening Standard
"The military memoir of the moment" Times
"A very fine book, a powerful dispatch from the front line ... what impresses is the sheer candour and immediacy" Spectator
"An extraordinary memoir ... Hennessey has a reporter's eye for detail and a soldier's nose for bullshit" Guardian
"Must rank as the most accomplished work of military witness to emerge from British war-fighting since 1945 Independent Remarkable ... conveys vividly what it's like to experience combat" Jeremy Paxman, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year
"All politicians need to read honest accounts of war - at no time more than now - and Patrick Hennessey's The Junior Officers Reading Club is one of the very best" David Cameron, Observer, Books of the Year
