War and Turpentine is the astonishing result of Hertmans’ reckoning with his grandfather’s diaries. It is a book that lies at the crossroads of novel, biography, autobiography and history… It seems aching to be called 'Sebaldian', and earns the epithet glowingly… In McKay’s lyrical translation, every detail has the heightened luminosity of poetry… War and Turpentine has all the marking of a future classic.

Staggering richness of language; brutal, deep, haunting. Mesmerising from page one... If you think you’ve had enough of the muddy gore of Flanders Fields, believe me you haven’t, not until you’ve read this book.

Masterpiece, an accolade often casually bestowed, really does describe this magnificent book… A haunting blend of fact and fiction… Page after page holds you rapt with admiration for both Hertmans' writing and his hero.

Hertmans writes with an eloquence reminiscent of W.G. Sebald... a masterly book about memory, art, love and war.

A lovingly reimagined life of an ordinary man whose life was for ever marked by the First World War. Fine prose.

Wonderful, full of astonishingly vivid moments of powerful imagery… Hertmans’s book is something else again: it has a quietly resonant personal epic quality that dwarfs all around it.

Skilful and lyrical reconstruction of a life transformed by war, love and art… It is not often a book succeeds on many levels, but War and Turpentine manages to be a mesmerising portrait of an artist as a young man, a significant contribution to First World War literature and a brilliant evocation of a vanished world.

Hertmans follows in his grandfather’s footsteps in this brilliant and moving imagined reconstruction, his imagination beautifully filling the gaps as he describes “the battle between the transcendent, which he yearned for, and the memory of death and destruction, which held him in its clutches.”

A masterly treatise on the interconnections of life, art, memory, and heartbreaking love...Hertmans’s prose, with a deft translation from McKay, works with the same full palette as Urbain Martien’s paintings: vivid, passionate—and in the end, life-affirming.

War and Turpentine is an exquisite, loving reconstruction of a man’s interior life, at once deeply personal and yet so evocative of many of his generation, affected by the long shadow of war. In beautiful, glimmering prose, Hertmans shows us how our experiences shape us all, and how, even in a life of sorrow and heartache, dignity can be found.

Superb… The central section, which descrives life in the trenches in the First World War and the story of a lost love, is especially evocative

Affecting and unusual… Hertman’s first-person construction evokes the brutality of the trenches but also their monotony... But the majority of War and Turpentine is not set in wartime, and deals with remembrance of a different sort. It is the soft edges of history, memory and creation that are its true subject… The heart of the book is a masterly portrait of a man’s grief over lost love and his commemoration of it in art.

[A] vivid novel

Hilarious and thoughtful.

Darkly funny yet moving debut.

A “serious” novel that is genuinely and frequently funny.

This debut novel from Jesse Armstrong…is every bit as funny and cringe-inducing as the sitcoms he made his name writing.

one of the year’s funniest books.

brilliantly funny… the dialogue and the characters are fantastic.

Zusak's novel is a highwire act of inventiveness and emotional suppleness

A triumph of control ...one of the most unusual and compelling of recent Australian novels

...the much talked about The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak...should soon have the UK under its spell.

...this is a novel to touch even the coldest of hearts - definitely 2007's first must-read book.

A compelling tale from the start...definitely 2007's first must-read book.

A moving story from the German perspective of everyday civilian hardship and surivival under the Third Reich. It celebrates the power of words and love, in the face of unutterable suffering

Death turns out to be a tender narrator in Zusak's 'The Book Thief' [...] This novel movingly depicts the Himmel Street community, and its orphaned book thief, Liesel Meminger

Your emotions by the end of this novel are shot to pieces, but it's well worth it.

Although already a bestselling children's book, THE BOOK THIEF's insightful and poignant tone and appealing characters...are amply equipped to capture adults, too.