This is the story of an Australian surgeon, Dorrigo Evans, a POW in a Japanese camp during World War II, working on the Thai-Burma railway. It moves backwards and forwards in time as we learn of his life, his great love and the lives of his fellows, both captors and POWs. It’s a bit confusing to start with but stick with it for it is a most magnificent, horrific, masterful book on the period. The wartime atrocities are horrendous. Dorrigo is sustained by the memory of an affair he had just before the war. We move on to life after the war where Dorrigo needs a string of mistresses to block out the horror. He is seen as a hero; he doesn’t feel like one. This is not an easy read; it’s tough on the stomach but it is both impressive, disturbing and important...'.
This is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.
*WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014*
'An unforgettable story of men at war' The Times
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.
