The Poppy Factory

Előszó

Mv beginnings were hardly auspicious. My father was killed in the battle for Caen in the late summer of 1944 just six months before my birth and I was plucked into the world by Caesarean operation because my mother's doctors considered her in too weak a state to survive a normal delivery. Their diagnosis was undoubtedly correct but their skills failed to save her. She never left the hospital and died there when I was six weeks old. I still dream of her but cannot see her face. I don't dream of my father. They are no more than a pair of photographs in a folding red leather frame, its edges fraying, old, but their eyes remain youthful and smiling, alive with confidence and hope, those of two strangers, dead now for more than thirty years.
My paternal grandfather, General Adrian Garrard, took immediate possession of my infant self on the grounds that he enjoyed far better financial resources than my mother's parents, and, furthermore, that I bore his name. He was a formidable adversary if baulked and I doubt if plain Mr and Mrs Simms living in a semidetached in Rickmansworth put up much of an argument, but, if they did, I am sure he would have clinched his victory by reminding them that their daughter had spent the last five years of her life under his roof, first as his secretary and finally as the wife of his son, my father.
I was installed in his large Cornish manor house under the immediate care of his housekeeper, Miss Hilda Wilkins. She had a purple birthmark on her left cheek, jet black hair, green eyes and I decided early on that she was a witch. There seemed no reason to revise this opinion when I discovered later that before entering my grand-
Y11 Vissza

Fülszöveg

'Beautifully told' BERNICE RUBENS
The best novel I've read so far this year and one of the best war novels I've ever read' THE AUSTRALIAN
'It is the pity of war, its futility and its effect on men that Fairchild sensitively captures' SUNDAY MIRROR
I've lived with it on my conscience all my life and now I've got to rid myself of it before I die. It will all seem ancient history to you - and yet, if it hadn't happened
General Adrian Garrard, a man devoted to duty and discipline, leaves a strange legacy to his grandson and namesake: an old Colt revolver and a faded manuscript. The revolver had belonged to the General. The manuscript concerned the General's war, the one called Great, the war to end all wars. Revealing dark, long-hidden secrets, it told of nightmare encounters with ragged, half-human creatures in the unearthly night of No Man's Land, and of the agonizing decision the General was forced to make on the floor of a man-made hell - a decision that changed not only his own life and that of the woman he loved, but the course of history in the twentieth century as well.
Already compared to the works of Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, THE POPPY FACTORY is one of the most remarkable and powerful novels of war in our times ever written. Its suspense will grip you. Its horror will haunt you.
'Unputdownable' IRISH Vissza