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  • Published: 7 May 2015
  • ISBN: 9781844882823
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
Categories:

The Great Explosion




The Great Explosion by Brian Dillon: a masterful account of a terrible disaster in a remarkable place

In April 1916, shortly before the commencement of the Battle of the Somme, a fire started in a vast munitions works located in the Kentish marshes. The resulting series of explosions killed 108 people and injured many more.

In a brilliant piece of storytelling, Brian Dillon recreates the events of that terrible day - and, in so doing, sheds a fresh and unexpected light on the British home front in the Great War. He offers a chilling natural history of explosives and their effects on the earth, on buildings, and on human and animal bodies. And he evokes with vivid clarity one of Britain's strangest and most remarkable landscapes - where he has been a habitual explorer for many years. The Great Explosion is a profound work of narrative, exploration and inquiry from one of our most brilliant writers.

Brian Dillon is the author of In the Dark Room, a memoir that won the Irish Book Award for Nonfiction 2005, and Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2009. He teaches at the Royal College of Art.
%%%The Great Explosion by Brian Dillon: a masterful account of a terrible disaster in a remarkable place

In April 1916, shortly before the commencement of the Battle of the Somme, a fire started in a vast munitions works located in the Kentish marshes. The resulting series of explosions killed 108 people and injured many more.

In a brilliant piece of storytelling, Brian Dillon recreates the events of that terrible day - and, in so doing, sheds a fresh and unexpected light on the British home front in the Great War. He offers a chilling natural history of explosives and their effects on the earth, on buildings, and on human and animal bodies. And he evokes with vivid clarity one of Britain's strangest and most remarkable landscapes - where he has been a habitual explorer for many years. The Great Explosion is a profound work of narrative, exploration and inquiry from one of our most brilliant writers.

'The Great Explosion is exhilarating and moving and lyrical. It is a quiet evisceration of a landscape through the discovery of a lost history of destructiveness, a meditation on Englishness, an autobiography, a mapping of absences. I loved it.' Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

'Forensic, fascinating, endlessly interesting' Philip Hoare, Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Leviathan and The Sea Inside

Brian Dillon is the author of In the Dark Room, a memoir that won the Irish Book Award for Nonfiction 2005, and Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2009. He teaches at the Royal College of Art.
%%%In April 1916, shortly before the commencement of the Battle of the Somme, a fire started in a vast munitions works located in the Kentish marshes. The resulting series of explosions killed 108 people and injured many more.

In a brilliant piece of storytelling, Brian Dillon recreates the events of that terrible day - and, in so doing, sheds a fresh and unexpected light on the British home front in the Great War. He offers a chilling natural history of explosives and their effects on the earth, on buildings, and on human and animal bodies. And he evokes with vivid clarity one of Britain's strangest and most remarkable landscapes - where he has been a habitual explorer for many years. The Great Explosion is a profound work of narrative, exploration and inquiry from one of our most brilliant writers.
%%%The Great Explosion by Brian Dillon: a masterful account of a terrible disaster in a remarkable place
In April 1916

  • Published: 7 May 2015
  • ISBN: 9781844882823
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
Categories:

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