Author:Reg Twigg
Survivor on the River Kwai is the heartbreaking story of one of the last survivors of the Burma Railway.
February 1942. A young British soldier is caught up in the worst defeat in the history of the British Army, the fall of Singapore.
Reg Twigg spends the next three years in hell, moving from jungle camp to jungle camp and building the Burma Railway for the all-conquering Japanese. Beaten, tortured, starving and forced to watch his comrades die, Reg fights for his survival, stealing from his captors, trapping animals and even making his own tobacco. That Reg survived is testimony to his own courage and determination, his will to beat the alien brutality of camp guards who had nothing but contempt for him and his fellow POWs. He was a risk taker whose survival strategies sometimes bordered on genius.
As moving and harrowing as The Last Fighting Tommy, with the drama of David Lean's The Bridge Over the River Kwai and the heart of The Forgotten Highlander, Survivor on the River Kwai is Reg's story - his pain, his triumphs and even his forgiveness.
Reg Twigg was born at Wigston (Leicester) barracks on 16 December 1913. He was called up to the Leicestershire Regiment in 1940 but instead of fighting Hitler he was sent to the Far East, stationed at Singapore. When captured by the Japanese, he decided he would do everything to survive.
After his repatriation from the Far East, Reg returned to Leicester. With his family he returned to Thailand in 2006, and revisited the sites of the POW camps. Reg died in 2013, at the age of ninety-nine, two weeks before the publication of this book.
One of the finest accounts yet of life in the jungle PoW camps, at once humbling, heartwarming and enraging
—— Allan Mallinson , The TimesA fit testament to the bravery, selflessness and sacrifice of a magnificent group of people
—— Sunday TelegraphFrightening and fascinating
—— Mail on SundayLet Me Go grips the reader completely
—— Glasgow HeraldThe book evocatively portrays the deprivations of wartime Berlin and the devastating emotional impact of one evil individual
—— Irish TimesAn uncompromising story of violence and beauty, searing trauma and a dreamlike circulation between the past and the present… This marvellous memoir is his poetic message, floating gently towards us
—— Joanna Bourke , Sunday TelegraphVivid… The war on the ground and the conflict in the head are combined in a work of art
—— Iain Finlayson , The TimesThe most haunting book I read this year
—— Lia Mills , Irish TimesMy Life as a Foreign Country is brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered - a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature.
—— Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They CarriedContemporary wars are built on the distortion of language, the awful acronyms and euphemisms meant to screen us from the real. But in Brian Turner's extraordinarily capable hands, language is war's undoing, in the sense that these words won't allow absurdity and terror to be anything less than real.
—— Mark DotyBrian Turner has given us not so much a memoir as a mediation, rendered with grace and wit and wisdom. If you want to know what modern soldiers see when they look at their world, read this book.
—— Larry Heinemann, author of Paco's Story, recipient of the National Book Award.I love about My Life as A Foreign Country is its weird laugh-out-loud mood, and its in-the-thick-of-it hyper-sensual ability to capture beauty in the midst of terror. In these pages, home-spun truths sit alongside quotes from Marcus Aurelius, Walt Whitman and The Bhagavad Gita. My Life... is the melted-down language of a dream despatch from a capacious-hearted warrior poet.
—— Daljit NagraA brilliant fever dream of war’s surreality, its lastingness, its place in families and in the fate of nations. Each sentence has been carefully measured, weighed with loss and vitality, the hard-earned language of a survivor who has seen the world destroyed and written it back to life. This is a profound and beautiful work of art.
—— Benjamin Busch, author of Dust to DustTurner’s voice is prophetic, an eerie calm in the midst of calamity - as precise as a bullet, as all-encompassing as the apocalypse. One question echoes through these pages - How does someone leave a war behind, and walk into the rest of their life? My Life as a Foreign Country holds a mirror up to what propels us, over and over, into those wars, and serves as a reminder that, in the end, war is simply about counting the dead. Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful, in the end.
—— Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments and The Ticking Is the BombAs simultaneously delicate and hard-edged as his poetry.
—— Richard W Strachan , HeraldTurner’s eloquent rendering illuminates both the shared space and the painful divide between poet and soldier, mission and memory, war and peace.
—— Roxanna Robinson , Washington PostThe marriage of [Aubrey’s] words and Scurr’s is so smoothly achieved that I have no idea where one leaves off and the other intervenes
—— Allan Massie , ScotsmanScurr’s imaginative feat of retrieval has produced a perfect book for dipping into when you want a taste of what it was like to be alive in the 17th century
—— John Carey , Sunday TimesIt is a testament to [Scurr’s] skill that you quickly stop thinking about technique and instead slip happily into the company of the character she has created. The wealth of research and the seams between imagination and reality disappear from view. This is truly selfless biography
—— Daisy Hay, 5 stars , Daily TelegraphA game-changer in the world of biography
—— Mary Beard , GuardianA delightful read about the ebb and flow of thoughts in one extraordinary man’s mind
—— Claire Harman , Evening StandardDrawing on [Aubrey’s] manuscripts and letters, [Ruth Scurr] has fashioned, as chronologically as possible, an autobiography in the form of the diary that Aubrey never wrote. It fits him perfectly… Ms Scurr has done him proud
—— The EconomistAubrey was a delightful, self-deprecating man ... A conventional biography of Aubrey could easily have become a portrait of the time through which he had lived, allowing the man himself to be overshadowed ... Instead, Ruth Scurr has invented the diary Aubrey might have written, incorporating his own chaotic, sometimes scrappy literary remains to form a continuous narrative. ... lucky him to have been accorded a biography as whimsical as his own self
—— Clive Aslet , Country LifeScurr’s book illuminates and poignantly captures the voice of a man more often a “ghostly record keeper” in his own writing
—— Carl Wilkinson , Financial TimesJohn Aubrey brilliantly reconfigures the art of biography
—— David Abulafia , Times Higher EducationBold and imaginative recreation of the diary of the 17th-century antiquary. It shows how close a scrupulous and unselfregarding biographer can come to the savour of a life
—— Graham Robb , SpectatorA genuinely remarkable work of biographical innovation.
—— Stuart Kelly , TLS, Books of the YearI’d like to reread Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey every Christmas for at least the next five years: I love being between its humane pages, which celebrate both scholarly companionship and deep feeling for the past
—— Alexandra Harris , GuardianRuth Scurr’s innovative take on biography has an immediacy that brings the 17th century alive
—— Penelope Lively , GuardianAnyone who has not read Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey can have a splendid time reading it this summer. Scurr has invented an autobiography the great biographer never wrote, using his notes, letters, observations – and the result is gripping
—— AS Byatt , GuardianA triumph, capturing the landscape and the history of the time, and Aubrey’s cadence.
—— Daily TelegraphA brilliantly readable portrait in diary form. Idiosyncratic, playful and intensely curious, it is the life story Aubrey himself might have written.
—— Jane Shilling , Daily MailScurr knows her subject inside out.
—— Simon Shaw , Mail on SundayThe diligent Scurr has evidence to support everything… Learning about him is to learn more about his world than his modest personality, but Scurr helps us feel his pain at the iconoclasm and destruction wrought by the Puritans without resorting to overwrought language.
—— Nicholas Lezard , GuardianAcclaimed and ingeniously conceived semi-fictionalised autobiography… Scurr’s greatest achievement is to bring both Aubrey and his world alive in detail that feels simultaneously otherworldly and a mirror of our own age… It’s hard to think of a biographical work in recent years that has been so bold and so wholly successful.
—— Alexander Larman , Observer