The Great Explosion

In April 1916, shortly before the commencement of the Battle of the Somme, a fire started in a vast munitions works located in the Kentish marshes. The resulting series of explosions killed 108 people and injured many more. This book recreates the events of that terrible day and sheds an unexpected light on the British home front in the Great War.

A subtle, human history of the early twentieth century ... The Great Explosion deftly covers a tumultuous period of history while centring on the tiniest moments - just punctuation marks in time

A brilliant evocation of place grasped in its modernity

[Dillon's] account of the Faversham explosion is as bold as it is dramatic, while his descriptive passages about the marshlands of Kent are so evocative that you can practically feel the mud sticking at your feet

Dillon ... has a WG Sebald-like gift for interrogating the landscape ... a work of real elegiac seriousness that goes to the heart of a case of human loss and destruction in England's sinister pastures green

Exhilarating ...utterly beguiling

Brian Dillon is the author of In the Dark Room , a memoir that won the Irish Book Award for Nonfiction 2005, and Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives , which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2009. He teaches at the Royal College of Art.