Somewhere in a desert - Dominique Sigaud

Set in the aftermath of the Gulf War, Dominique Sigaud's first novel tells the story of an American soldier, a casualty of the war, through a series of linked episodes that all turn out to centre around him, seeing the war through his eyes, and those of those around him, Iraqi and American, men and women.

Written in a striking, spare prose, reminiscent of Duras in French or Hemingway in English, it is a novel of great, but quiet, ambition, remarkable in its avoidance of the cold tricksiness of so much contemporary French fiction, and its preparedness to grapple with the big themes of life, love and death.