Quartered Safe Out Here

Emma Larkin The first line of the book is: ‘The first time I smelt Jap was in a deep dry riverbed in the Dry Belt, somewhere near Meiktila. I can no more describe the smell than I could describe a colour, but it was heavy and pungent and compounded of stale cooked rice and sweat and human waste and … Jap.’ And this takes you straight back to his time during the Second World War in Burma. To me it is really visceral and effective in the way it describes what life was like then and what life was like for a private in the army. It is a very ground-level view of what it was like. For that reason it is a... (Source)