The First of July PDF

During World War I, four Allied soldiers experience the Battle of the Somme together in this ';utterly gripping' historical novel (Booklist, starred review).

On July 1, 1913, four very different men are leading four very different lives. Benedict is a British music student. Jean-Baptiste is a French blacksmith apprentice. Harry is living a life of comfort with his American wife in New York, while working-class Frank, a carpenter and coffinmaker, spends his spare time racing bicycles in London.

Exactly three years later, it is just after seven in the morning, and there are a few seconds of peace as the guns on the Somme fall silent and larks soar across the battlefield, singing as they fly over the trenches. What follows is a day of catastrophe in which Allied casualties number almost one hundred thousand. A horror that would have been unimaginable not so long ago will forever change the lives of Benedict, Jean-Baptiste, Harry, and Frank.

From an author who ';combines a Ruth Rendelllike psychological realism and a Dickensian feel for life's roulette,' The First of July is an unforgettable epic that captures the chaos of the early twentieth century (The Wall Street Journal). ';Gritty, disturbing, moody, and intensely real, the novel's psychological impact is like those of Mary Doria Russell's A Thread of Grace and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke and asks readers to consider war's high costs' (Booklist, starred review).