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The following is an extremely selective list of some of the books that inspired me as I was writing Somewhere in France. I have also included some websites that I found both reliable and informative, as well as a short list of films that are set during the Great War or shortly thereafter. At the bottom of the page is a map that appears in the print version of Somewhere in France; click on it for a larger version.

General History:

• Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins
• Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War edited by Margaret Higonnet
• War Girls: the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry in the First World War by Janet Lee
• The Roses of No Man’s Land by Lyn Macdonald
• The Perfect Summer: England 1913, Just Before the Storm by Juliet Nicolson
• The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age by Juliet Nicolson
• The First World War by Stuart Robson
• Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History by Jay Winter

Poetry:

• The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
• The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon
• Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War edited by Catherine Reilly

Fiction:

• Not so Quiet by Helen Zenna Smith
• The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
• The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart
• Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden
• The Wars by Timothy Findley
• Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Memoirs:

• Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
• The War Diary of Claire Gass: 1915-1918
• The Last Fighting Tommy: The Life of Harry Patch, Last Veteran of the Trenches, 1898-2009 by Harry Patch

Websites:

• The Long, Long Trail
• The Great War Archive
• The Last Tommy
• The Great War
• This Intrepid Band
• The Western Front Association
• Edwardian Promenade

Films:

• Regeneration
• A Very Long Engagement
• Chariots of Fire
• The Trench
• Passchendaele
• Birdsong
• My Boy Jack

Click on the map to magnify

The creator of this map, which features places that are mentioned in Somewhere in France, is Sam Onderdonk, who applies an artist’s eye and cartographer’s precision to his one-of-a-kind hand-drawn maps. He accepts custom commissions and may be contacted via his Etsy shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/TheMadCartographer.