It is the finest and noblest book of men in war that I have ever read. I read it over once each year to remember how things really were so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them

The most truthful and profound exploration of the experiences of war...is to be found in The Middle Parts Of Fortune... Manning explored the moral ambiguities of war in the language of the men with whom he served. He articulated the suffering and comradeship of men who might have no other literary record

Realism and art combined

Manning's literary masterpiece

Without doubt the greatest British novel of the war

No praise can be too sheer for this book...it justifies every heat of praise. Its virtues will be recognized more and more as time goes on

The mallow juice of life

This novel takes us far from the patriotic myth and romance, the zeal and heroics normally associated with warfare... These men have neither patriotic fervour nor faith in their leaders. Their ordinary concerns, gallows humour, and sullen tempers give them a timeless quality. The unrelenting honesty of their story remains as a stamp of authenticity which makes this novel so remarkable, its soldiers and their battles so haunting, and gives their account a classic status.

Fobbit is fast, razor sharp, and seven kinds of hilarious. It deserves a place alongside Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 as one of our great comic novels about the absurdity of war

When it comes to war literature, a comic novel will always do a better job with the big picture

Fobbit, an Iraq-war comedy, is that rarest of good things: the book you least expect, and most want. It is everything that terrible conflict was not: beautifully planned and perfectly executed; funny and smart and lyrical; a triumph. This debut marks the arrival of a massive talent

A satire of comfortably numb life during wartime... Abrams spent 20 years in the Army, including a tour of Iraq, and he merely has to lightly fictionalize his observations to point out the absurdities of American occupation

An instant classic... The Iraq War’s answer to Catch-22

This is a book that speaks to the power of fiction - a war story too profane and profound for the newspapers and the nightly news. Want to think, laugh and cry, all at the same time? Read this novel.

This delightful, readable, believable and useful book made me furious!

[Fobbit] is] like an Office-style satire that happens to be set on a military base in an active war zone

Abrams is...convincing... Fobbit is a vicious skewering of this surprisingly large military subculture of war avoidance

A unique behind-the-wire glimpse at life in the FOB and the process of “spinning” a war for public consumption. A funny, hard-edged satire about recent history and modern war-making

Sardonic and poignant. Funny and bitter. Ribald and profane

You might not expect an Iraq War novel to be funny, but I laughed—more than once—as I read this one. I cringed, too. There’s simply so much to this book

Truly significant... a book about the absurdity of the way the war is fought, the way the war is projected back home, and the massive gulf between the two...a cynical satire in the same vein as the best works of legendary wartime authors like Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Kurt Vonnegut, and especially Joseph Heller.

Fobbit is two things in one – a scathing, deeply felt diatribe against military disasters large and small, and an often-hilarious examination of very human, very weak characters living next door to a combat zone. The good news is that you only have to buy one copy, and you should waste no time in doing so

Fobbit should be required reading for America. Hilarious and tragic, it’s as if Louis C.K. and Lewis Black provided commentary to The Hurt Locker. There will be innumerable comparisons to Catch-22, but Fobbit, believe me, stands on its own

Funny and evocative, with great glimpses of soldier-speak and deployment day to day life, each laugh in the novel is accompanied with a troubling insight into the different types of battles that our soldiers encounter on a non-traditional battlefield

The author describes Fobbit as an ‘anti-stupidity’ novel, not an anti-war novel, and with 20 years’ service he has the evidence and flair to write the former... Fobbit is bliss

Abrams shows these men and women in their natural habitats, stuck somewhere halfway between the actual violence of war and the goofy excess of American culture

The insanity is linguistic, and Abrams’s dark humor about lying through language would appeal to George Orwell... Fobbit invites us to laugh over our collective foolishness—foolishness that sometimes includes deaths. That’s the toughest, most painful laughter of all

“[Fobbit] gives such full-blooded life to the soldiers whose “pale, gooey center” is so antithetical to battlefield heroism that he propels the word into the everyday by the force of his narrative

Abram's tale is powerful stuff

If Vonnegut and Heller were the undisputed chroniclers of the madness of World War II, Abrams should be considered the resounding new voice of the Iraq War

[As] dark as it is funny, which is to say considerably... [Abrams has] written a book that makes you laugh and makes you wince, often at the same time, all the while staying true to its message: that people are foolish on many levels, sometimes fatally so, but they are all motivated by the same basic needs, desires, and fears...There are no heroes here, but no villains either. Each character fights his own war, and nobody wins

[Abrams is] good on the squirm-inducing detail of physical discomforts and injuries

Though Fobbit is a satire…its value lies more in the fact that it’s a very detailed, very informative portrait of the madness in Iraq in the early years of the American occupation. The sights and sounds are adroitly rendered, the damnable heat skilfully rendered in text. There are times when you can almost smell the gore on the concrete

An enjoyable and alternative take on war