In his fourth novel, British playwright and poet Adam Thorpe takes us back to the freakishly hot, dry summer of 1921—the summer of dust storms in London, parched and cracking earth in the countryside, and autumn tints in July. Holed up in a cottage in the Chilterns, a young man strives to write the first great novel of the Great War, impelled by his own suffering. Outward events and inner crises deflect him from his purpose, and love intervenes in the form of two very different women, while a visit to the hallucinatory wreckage of postwar Flanders brings strange repercussions in its wake. Thorpe touches the marrow of this jazz and death-haunted period, which many consider the most excitingly creative period of the last century.

"Thorpe's First World War is not like any other"—Herald (Glasgow)