There's a whole world of Dahl still to discover in a newly collected book of his deliciously dark tales for adults . . .

In war, are we at our heroic best or our cowardly worst? Featuring the autobiographical stories from Roald Dahl's time as a fighter pilot in the Second World War as well as seven other tales of conflict and strife, Dahl reveals the human side of our most inhumane activity.

Roald Dahl is one of the few writers I know whose work can accurately be described as addictive

The absolute master of the twist in the tale

'Young and old, male and female, east and west, modern and traditional, all elements blend in this exquisite collection...sensitive, elegant and beautifully descriptive'

Marra creates an unnerving story of a world, then and now, dominated by untouchable authorities that operate at every social level... a writer of intelligence, wit and sensitivity, adept at telling stories that entertain but also create the sensation that they are not so strange as fiction

A work of extraordinary confidence and empathy... a distinctive and heady fictional cocktail... thoroughly entertaining

Marra’s sharp prose is alternatively ironic and poetic, giving a sympathetic voice to the most dispossessed characters…A memorable book on memory and how we try to remember’

A very Russian nostalgia and sense of narrative resonate in this story of memories and how we remember, that runs from Stalin's purges to modern war-ravaged Chechnya. The lives of sympathetically voiced criminals, mercenaries, lovers and artists are interwoven in precisely crafted plotlines

Addictive

A superbly artful collection

Remarkable... Marra is a gifted writer with the energy and the ambition to explore the lives of characters whose experiences and whose psyches might seem, until we read his work, so distant from our own. Reading his work is like watching the restoration — the reappearance, on the page — of those whom history has erased

Audacious... brilliant... ambitious and fearless

Each story is a gem… almost unbearably moving

Seamlessly narrated, with flashes of dark humour

Marra’s Russia is marked by both interconnection and darkly comic irony... the book’s brilliance and humor are laced with the somber feeling that the country is allergic to evolution... A powerful and melancholy vision of a nation with long memories and relentless turmoil