Allan Massie

Burmese Days

One Fourteenth of an Elephant: A Memoir of Life and Death on the Burma-Thailand Railway

By

Doubleday 522pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

This is a horrifying and extraordinary book. Nobody will read it for pleasure. It is a record of man’s inhumanity to man, an appalling story of Japanese brutality during the Second World War; but – and one can only be grateful for this – it is also testimony to the resilience of the human spirit, to courage and endurance, and to the strength of comradeship. Otherwise it would be utterly intolerable.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • A piece of Literary Review history from way back in 1983: John Haffenden talks to the great Iris Murdoch. ,
    • Britain’s only travelling lit fest, the Garden Museum Literary Festival is heading to Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for a… ,
    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    • 'The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory', as Michelangelo’s 'David… ,
    • 'Munch’s later works show us a man liberated from the torments that gave rise to some of the best-known early works… ,
    • 'We read from left to right and from start to finish. Or do we?' Stuart Hannabus considers the merits of reading i… ,
    Follow Us