In praise of the White Guard

Usually I wait until the end of a book to make comments about it but The White Guard is one of the most enjoyable books I have read for a long time. Enjoyable not in the sense of it being a rip-roaring yarn but because it is so well described, detailed and conveyed making you really sense the war going on around you. As a description of the way that being in the middle of a war feels like trying to stand up on a piece of floating ice then this book, which is criminally undervalued compared to say All Quiet on the Western Front, is in a class of its own. If the idea of a story being based around a City and a few selected individuals and one family being torn apart by war sounds appealing then track down The White Guard. The way it is working out so far, and unless things go off the boil in the last 100 pages this is shaping up to be one of my favourite reads of the year.