Middle parts of fortune, the

A powerful story of men at war from the perspective of an ordinary soldier. First published anonymously in 1929 because its language was considered far too frank for public circulation, The Middle Parts of Fortune was hailed as an extraordinary novel by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Lawrence of Arabia and Ernest Hemingway. Its author was in fact Frederic Manning, an Australian writer who fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Never before published in Australia, The Middle Parts of Fortune is now recognised as a twentieth-century classic. 'The finest and noblest book of men in war that I have ever read. I read it over once each year to remember how things really were so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them.' Ernest Hemingway