📖 Private Peaceful

Longer novels from Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo are always a particular treat, and Private Peaceful is no exception. Tragic, surprising and engaging in equal measures, Morpurgo's novel charts both the childhood of young Thomas Peaceful in the early years of the 20th century, and his eventual underage enlistment in the British army to help fight the First World War. It is, above all, a poignant story of war and about all of its many life-changing effects on those involved - also the brutality of the commanding regimes and the relentless squalor of trench warfare. It's not for the squeamish - Morpurgo tells it like it was and his honest insight is on every page for all to appreciate.