Author:Adam Foulds
Set in the 1950s, The Broken Word is an extraordinary poetic sequence that animates and illuminates a dark, terrifying period in British colonial history.The combination here of language and imagery that feel utterly contemporary, and subject matter - tribal violence and subsequent retribution - that seems almost Homeric, gives the narrative all the febrile energy of classical drama, re-charged and re-imagined.
Tom has returned to his family's farm in Kenya for the summer vacation between school and university when he is swept up by the events of the Mau Mau uprising. Beginning with sporadic, brutal attacks by dispossessed Kikuyu on the British now occupying their land - attacks often executed with nothing more than traditional panga knives - the conflict escalates as the terrified British stop at nothing to re-impose order, eventually driving most of the Kikuyu population into the prison camps of what has become known as 'Britain's Gulag'. As Tom is propelled into violence and horror the poem mutates into a meditation on the inheritance of conflict, the destruction of innocence and the impossibility of afterwards saying what one has seen.
Written with rigour, intelligence, and a fierce, unsparing clarity, this is profound, lyrical work with that rare confidence and thrilling originality that announce the arrival of a significant new voice.
Wonderful stuff
—— Sunday TimesFascinating, delightful, illuminating. The diarists soon become like old friends ... and make our wartime past seem no more distant than yesterday
—— Mail on SundayIt's always easy to imagine people in this period becalmed in a sepia-toned limbo. This book tells the messy, but far more interesting, truth
—— Time OutFew books have so successfully stepped inside the minds of the British people during wartime
—— MetroA fascinating account of everyday life in Britain
—— Good HousekeepingVibrant, lyrical and engrossing
—— Daily ExpressA mesmerising read
—— BBC HistoryOne closes the books with the odd sense of saying farewell to a group of interesting and interestingly different individuals one might have encountered on a long journey
—— Sunday TimesI love these diaries. They have the attraction of being stories, but REAL stories - better than any novel
—— Margaret ForsterIn her group biography of three monarchs, Carter has succeeded in painting their personalities in vivid colours...she brings an excellent biographer's eye for the telling detail...the great appeal of this book lies in it narration and comparative analysis of the life and personality of her imperial subjects...well-researched and expertly written...an engaging and remarkably even-handed portrayal
—— The Times Literary SupplementThat these three absurd men could ever have held the fate of Europe in their hands is a fact as hilarious as it is terrifying. I haven't enjoyed a historical biography this much since Lytton Strachey's Victoria
—— Zadie SmithMiranda Carter writes with lusty humour, has a fresh clarifying intelligence, and a sharp eye for telling details. This is traditional narrative history with a 21st-century zing. A real corker of a book
A highly original way of looking at the years that led up to 1914
—— Antonia Fraser , Sunday Telegraph Books of the YearCarter deftly interpolates history with psychobiography to provide a damning indictment of monarchy in all its forms
—— Will Self , New Statesmen Books of the YearA depiction of bloated power and outsize personalities in which Carter picks apart the strutting absurdity of the last emperors on the eve of catastrophe
—— Financial Times Books of the YearTakes what should have been a daunting subject and through sheer wit and narrative élan turns it into engaging drama. Carter has a notable gift for characterisation
—— Jonathan Coe , Guardian Books of the Year
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