Going West

Lester Cary is eight generations of American fighting blood distilled into a man who wants nothing more than to be a broker. He is his ancestors' contradiction: big-bodied, built for physical life, but soft in every nerve for the violence that defined his family line. His father fought the Spanish, his grandfather the Confederacy, his great-great-grandfather the Redcoats. Yet all of it had been alien to Lester's understanding of what a life is for. Then the call comes. World War I drags this civilian into the mud of the Western Front, and the question that follows him through the trenches is not whether he will survive, but whether the man who enters the war can ever find his way back to the man who left. Basil King writes with unsentimental precision about the transformation of ordinary people into instruments of violence, and what remains when the uniform comes off.