The Fires of Gallipoli is a heartbreaking portrayal of friendship forged in the trenches of the First World War.
‘In this vivid and engaging novel of war and friendship, Barney Campbell shows us once again that he is a natural writer. This is a novel of men at arms of the highest quality’. Alexander McCall Smith
Edward Salter is a shy, reserved lawyer whose life is transformed by the outbreak of war in 1914. On his way to fight in the Gallipoli campaign, he befriends the charming and quietly courageous Theodore Thorne. Together they face the carnage and slaughter, stripped bare to their souls by the hellscape and only sustained by each other and the moments of quiet they catch together.
Thorne becomes the crutch on whom Edward relies throughout the fighting. When their precious leave from the frontline coincides, Theo invites Edward home to his parents’ idyllic estate in Northamptonshire. Here Edward meets Thorne’s beguiling sister Miranda.
Edward escapes the broiling, fetid charnel-house of Gallipoli to work on the staff of Lord Kitchener, then on to the Western Front and post-war espionage in Constantinople. An odd coolness has descended between Edward and Theo. Can their friendship survive at the end of the war when everything around them is corrupted and destroyed?
The Fires of Gallipoli is a heartbreaking, sweeping portrayal of friendship and its fragility at the very limits of humanity.