Echoes of War

The dramatic cover and the publisher's racy comment are misleading. These stories are much more subtle. Westall has very special gifts for reflecting war at a distance - sometimes through memory or the ghostly recreation of past events, sometimes the contemporary is filtered through distance or the child's eyes. There's a hard-edged realism to his writing which anchors the dramatic in the everyday, making his stories compulsive but often uncomfortable reading. There's at least a couple I'd want to share ('Adolf' and 'Zakky'), but the whole collection is worth reading.