The Letter Bearer | Granta

  • Published: 06/03/2014
  • ISBN: 9781847088253
  • Granta Books
  • 272 pages

The Letter Bearer

Robert Allison

The Rider has no memory of who he is, or how he came to be lying – dying – in the brutal heat of the North African desert. Rescued by a band of deserters, the Rider begins to piece together his identity, based on shards of recollection and the letters in his post bag.

The Letter Bearer is unlike any other novel of World War Two. It asks profound questions about trauma, warfare and the experience of desertion. This gripping story asks us to consider how men build hope when they have nothing left – not even a name.

A tremendous Second World War novel... [With] thickets of intense, opaque prose and some striking, hallucinatory descriptions of the desert... Allison writes powerfully - often thrillingly - about conflict... Tremendous

Adrian Turpin, Financial Times

A novel which lifts the fog of war by stages to reveal not chaos but a dreadful moral clarity

James Buchan

Takes its readers into the dark heart of war... Haunting... poignant... delivered with an unerring eye for detail. The literature of war is as old as war itself and this harrowing novel is a fine addition to it

Sunday Telegraph

The Author

Robert Allison has been a theatre director, a film music reviewer and a copy-editor. He lives in London. His debut novel, The Letter Bearer, was published by Granta Books in 2014 and was shortlisted for the 2014 Desmond Elliott Prize for New Writing.

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