The last solider who saw World War I died in 2009, and, with him, all direct memory of the horror of that war left the earth. Memory has become history, but Brian Kennedy argues that our
collective need to grieve the horrors of the Great War still remains. In this wide-ranging book he looks at a variety of fiction that has been written about World War I, from Michael
Morpurgo’sWar Horse and Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong to Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road and Timothy Findley’sThe Wars with many other books besides. Kennedy considers
the traditional stories and tropes of the war, along with modern revisionings, the role of women in the war and even Irish issues and the divisions within the British Empire. In the end, he
argues persuasively that the cultural process of grieving concerns both the fear of forgetting and the need to build a narrative arc to contain events that shaped the past century.
