Small Wars: A Novel
Passionate and brilliantly rendered, Small Wars questions how honor can exist amid cruelty and asks what becomes of intimacy in the grinding gears of empire. A major in the British Army, Hal Treherne is a dedicated soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. He is eager to lead his men into...
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Passionate and brilliantly rendered, Small Wars questions how honor can exist amid cruelty and asks what becomes of intimacy in the grinding gears of empire. A major in the British Army, Hal Treherne is a dedicated soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. He is eager to lead his men into combat; his wife, Clara, however, is relieved when they are posted instead to seemingly peaceful sun-kissed Cyprus. But war erupts over unification with Greece, the island is consumed by violence—and Hal discovers that his military training cannot help him navigate the minefields of moral compromise that lie beneath every battle he fights. Clara grows fearful of her increasingly distant husband. When she needs him most, she finds the once-tender Hal a changed man—a betrayal that is only part of the shocking personal crisis to come.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780061929892 (0061929891)
Publish date: January 4th 2011
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Pages no: 400
Edition language: English
When I was in the Military in the '80s, Canada had a contingent of peacekeepers in Cyprus. I never really understood the crisis there, and why peacekeepers were needed. This book does a good job, I think, examining that situation, but more importantly, it examines the effect of trauma on individua...
Small Wars is the story of the British regular officer Major Henry ‘Hal’ Treherne and his wife Clara who arrives with their twin baby daughters Lotti and Meg in Limassol, Cyprus, in January 1956, about a month after her husband’s transfer from Germany to the garrison of Episkopi. Guerrilla rebels ar...
I have to confess that the novel had me hooked even before I started: as a child, my military family was stationed in the Mediterranean for some years, our first overseas posting. It was wonderful and a little traumatic -- some of our best and worst memories. The locational setting of Small Wars, ...