An Ice-cream War

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Description

William Boyd's sparkling debut novel on the grimly comic side of war, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'What do you think would happen if I shot an elephant in the balls' 'I think it would hurt a great deal.' Millions die on the Western Front but in East Africa a quite different war is being waged - one with little point and which is so ignored that it will carry on after the Armistice because no one bothers to tell both sides to stop. As the conflict sweeps up natives and colonials, so those left at home and those fighting abroad find themselves unable to escape the tide of history bearing down on them.

Author Bio

William Boyd is the author of eleven novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year, the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and a Richard & Judy selection. His most recent novel, Waiting for Sunrise, was published in 2011. William Boyd lives in London.