The First World War comes to harrowing life through the intertwined lives of the soldier-poets in Michael Korda's epic
Muse of Fire
.
With
, Michael Korda, the bestselling author of
Alone
and
Hero
, takes a novel approach to World War I by telling its history through the lives of the soldier-poets whose verses memorialize the war's unimaginable horrors. He begins with Rupert Brooke and the halcyon days before violence engulfed his generation--destroying the self-contented world of Edwardian England--and ends with the tragic death of Wilfred Owen, killed only days before the armistice brought an end to a war that took over 25,000,000 lives. In a sweeping narrative that echoes
The Guns of August
, Korda recounts these four years of a civilization destroying itself and portrays the lives and anguished deaths of the young men who unforgettably illuminated it. As the success of Pat Barker's
Regeneration
, the remake of
All Quiet on the Western Front
, and the images of brutal trench warfare in today's Ukraine demonstrate, contemporary interest in "the war to end war" remains high.