Nagasaki | Granta

  • Published: 04/08/2011
  • ISBN: 9781846274435
  • Granta Books
  • 352 pages

Nagasaki

Craig Collie

The events of a few days in August 1945 brought WWII to an end. They also destroyed the city of Nagasaki and killed 80,000 of its inhabitants, half of them instantly. Craig Collie is the first person to interview elderly survivors and descendants of the victims, and to stitch together their recollections with contemporary diaries and letters, and details from official documents. The result is a unique, unprecedented work of narrative reconstruction that follows ordinary Japanese in the hours after the blast to provide a gripping account of the decision-making, the denials, the devastation and the loss.

Collie, a TV documentary-maker, turns his eye, heart-wrenchingly, on the people whose lives were atomised. It is affecting stuff

Dan Jones, Telegraph

Collie has reasserted the tragedy of Nagasaki's annihilation and given it a human face... [The] emphasis on the plight of the innocent people is this book's great strength

Alastair Mabbott, Sunday Herald

Seldom do you find a treatise on a very well-documented historical event that grips you like a well-crafted thriller. Nagasaki achieves this. This is one of those rare books that manages to make history live and breathe through the characters it introduces you to, while weaving them into the wider context of the final phases of our last great war

Brisbane Courier Mail

The Author

Craig Collie is a TV documentary maker, and the author of several books about Australian history.

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