A Salient in Flanders

Day by day, the casualties mount …
To the literature of the Great War battlefields is added an unforgettable journey back in time: the story of the struggle for a single French village, a meticulously researched snapshot of the Western Front of April 1918. Written in a style as ruthlessly relentless as the fighting it portrays, the narrative hurls the reader directly into the eye of the storm that was Germany’s biggest-ever offensive of that war, Operation Michael, imprinting the assault vividly and indelibly upon the mind. With the British Army retreating across a ninety mile front, one point still holds firm: the village of Foncquevillers, where a single British regiment refuses to yield to a German attack by three, drawing some fifteen thousand ordinary young men into a climactic struggle for possession of a few kilometres of trench and barbed wire, the key to the outcome of the greater battle. For four days, the bloody fighting consumes all.

A Salient in Flanders is the story of this battle. On the British side, the men remain unbowed. On the German side, veterans of the campaign in Russia are thrown into repeated assault to overcome them and take their position. Here, around Foncquevillers, replacements drafted into the armies of both sides will fight their first battle alongside old sweats fighting yet one more. For many, the engagement will be their last. Yet even as all dream of home and sweethearts, the colossal German offensive gathers momentum to become an all-consuming juggernaut that brings the two sides into deadly collision within the cauldron of the trenches. None can avoid its rage and flame. As the German attack unleashes its awful power, all are thrown into a furnace of intense bombardment, frontal assault, desperate defence and brutal counter-attack. The struggle assumes an unforeseen intensity. Will any survive to taste victory?

Independent reader acclaim for A Salient in Flanders:

“Epic. The most subsuming, believable account of life in the trenches that I’ve ever encountered.”

“Tender and bittersweet, with a twist at the close that caught me unawares.”

“A devastating portrayal of war’s waste and cost, unique in its descriptions of the humanity of the individual and the frailty of the human psyche in the face of battle.”

“Real and grounded.”

Genres: World War 1 historical fiction; British literary fiction; war fiction.