KANDAK: Fighting with Afghans - Tapa blanda

Críticas

Required reading ... unfettered, unpretentious prose ... peppered with amusing anecdotes, a moving, humbling and rare account (Terri Judd Independent)

Graced with characters who might easily belong in a Rudyard Kipling or George MacDonald Fraser story (Ben Felsenburg Metro)

A passionate tribute to the Afghan soldiers he fought alongside in Helmand ... a serious piece of work ... excellent (Stephen Morrison Sunday Times)

Beautifully written with a mix of cantonment vernacular and Oxford-educated erudition, gives important insights at a crucial time in Afghanistan's transition (Rupert Edis Daily Telegraph)

His prose is lean and muscular, characterised by dry wit and acute intelligence. He also has a novelist's eye for the vivid image and the telling detail (Simon Griffith Daily Mail)

Soldiers who can write are as rare as writers who can strip down a machinegun in forty seconds, but Patrick Hennessey is one of the few (Sunday Times)

Hennessey is an exceptional talent (Times)

This variously tender, ironic and ferocious new voice gives us literature and not propaganda (Independent)

Hennessey has a reporter's eye for detail and a soldier's nose for bullshit (Guardian)

It's extremely rare to have this level of analytical intelligence combined with brutal first-hand experience (William Boyd)

Reseña del editor

From the author of the top ten bestseller The Junior Officers' Reading Club.

When Patrick Hennessey returned home from Afghanistan, battle-worn, exhilarated, unsure if he'd see anything like it in his life again, he left behind him bands of friendship forged in the heat of the moment between living and dying. The comrades he left furthest behind were Qiam, Syed and Majhib. They are still there in the dust and heat of Helmand, soldiers fighting for their homeland.

KANDAK is the story of how these lasting bonds were made. Written in the spare and lucid prose of Junior Officers' Reading Club, Patrick Hennessey tells of their comically bad first meetings, the mutual suspicion, incomprehension and cultural divides that characterise early interactions between British and Afghan soldiers, to the moments under fire when those divides can, sometimes, cross chaos and culture shocks to turn into brotherhood. An account of friendship and loss, of warriors and soldiers, KANDAK explores the reasons men pick up the sword, and how in the intensity of battle, unlikely alliances can be formed.