The Great Explosion: Gunpowder, the Great War, and a Disaster on the Kent Marshes

(Paperback)

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The story of a terrible disaster on the Great War home front, in one of Britain's most distinctive landscapes In April 1916, a fire started in a vast munitions works located in the marshes of Kent. The resulting series of explosions killed 108 people and injured many more. In a brilliant piece of storytelling, Brian Dillon recreates the events of that terrible day - and, in so doing, sheds a fresh and unexpected light on the British home front in the Great War. He offers a chilling natural history of explosives and their effects on the earth, on buildings, and on human and animal bodies. And he evokes with vivid clarity one of Britain's strangest and most remarkable landscapes - where he has been a habitual explorer for many years. The Great Explosion is a profound work of narrative, exploration and inquiry from one of our most brilliant writers.

Reviews

A subtle, human history of the early twentieth century ... The Great Explosion deftly covers a tumultuous period of history while centring on the tiniest moments - just punctuation marks in time * Financial Times *
A brilliant evocation of place grasped in its modernity * Guardian *
[Dillon's] account of the Faversham explosion is as bold as it is dramatic, while his descriptive passages about the marshlands of Kent are so evocative that you can practically feel the mud sticking at your feet * Evening Standard *
Dillon ... has a WG Sebald-like gift for interrogating the landscape ... a work of real elegiac seriousness that goes to the heart of a case of human loss and destruction in England's sinister pastures green * Irish Times *
Exhilarating ...utterly beguiling * Literary Review *

Author Bio

Brian Dillon is the author of In the Dark Room, a memoir that won the Irish Book Award for Nonfiction 2005, andTormented Hope- Nine Hypochondriac Lives, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2009. He teaches at the Royal College of Art.