Paperback. White cover with Somme image and green title.

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For conditions, please view the photographs. ‘Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going down of the sun, looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him. A photograph from the war, is also a photograph of the way the war will be remembered. It is a photograph of the future, of the future’s view of the past. We will remember them’ Relying more on personal impressions than systematic analysis, Geoff Dyer weaves a network of myth and memory that illuminates our own relation to the past.

Reviews: 

• Dyer is not the person to read if you’re looking for strong narrative threads. He is the person to read if you want to find out new things, be taken to places you never, ever dreamed existed and be entertained whilst learning a lot. The book flits around the central idea of what memorials are, particularly in relevance to World War One, why we need them, how we make them and how we interpret them. It moves between academic research and the vague and sometimes comic wanderings of Dyer and his mates as they trudge through the fields of France looking for memorials and the scenes of battle. Dyer’s original mind, quirky personality and enthusiasm for his subject make this book rise above the average history of WWI into something at times approaching art. I had a copy of this book years ago and then lent it to someone who never gave it back. It’s a testament to his brilliance that I had no hesitation in going out to buy another copy. It’s one to keep, to read and re-read.
• ‘[Dyer] is excellent on the different ambitions and effects of municipal memorials, and on photographs and paintings – the book is secured by his sensitivity to nuance, the range of his reading, and his willingness to contemplate something for as long it takes to understand it.’ – Sebastian Faulks, Mail on Sunday.
• ‘Articulates a response to the Great War which everybody feels but nobody has analysed so scrupulously.’ – Spectator.

Geoff Dyer is the author of Ways of Telling, a critical study of John Berger; the novels The Colour of Memory and The Search; and But Beautiful: A book about Jazz, which won the 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday / John Llwellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. He writes regularly for the Guardian and Observer, and is contributing editor of Esquire magazine.