‘Excoriating and profound . . . A remarkable work’ – Scotsman
‘Absolutely spectacular’ – France Info

19 October 1950. The war is not going to plan. In Paris, politicians gather to discuss what to do about Indochina. The conflict is unpopular back home in France: too expensive, and too far away for the public to care. Withdrawal is not an option – a global power cannot surrender to an army of peasants – but victory is impossible without more soldiers and more money. The soldiers can be sourced from the colonies, but the money is out of the question. A solution needs to be found.

In this gripping and shocking novel, Éric Vuillard exposes the tangled web of politicians, bankers and titans of industry who all had a vested interest in France’s prolonged presence in lands far from Paris. Skilfully skewering the guilty, Vuillard shows us how key players in conflicts throughout history often have a motivation even deeper and darker than nationalism and political ideology – greed. As well as bringing scenes from the battlefields to life, Vuillard looks beyond this visceral reality on the ground to the cold calculations of the boardroom elite with the power to turn a military win or loss into their financial gain.

Short, sharp and brutal, An Honourable Exit is a journey behind closed doors to witness how history is really made.

‘You will laugh and cry, but you will not be sorry that you read this rollicking story.’ – Malachy McCourt

‘An unforgettable wild right from start to finish.’ – John Bruning, New York Times bestselling author of Indestructible

‘Donohue’s memoir is a fascinating, vividly narrated recollection of the chaos of the Vietnam war.’ – Publishers Weekly

A CRAZY ADVENTURE IN A CRAZY WAR.

Following a rowdy night at his local New York bar, ex-Marine and merchant seaman “Chick” Donohue decides to complete a legendary mission. He will travel to Vietnam, track down his buddies in combat and bring them a cold beer from home. It’ll be the greatest beer run ever!

Now, decades on from 1968, he recounts the remarkable true story of how he actually did it.

Armed with Irish luck and a backpack full of alcohol, Chick works his passage to Vietnam, lands in Qui Nhon and begins to track down his serving friends one by one.

But things quickly go awry, and as he talks his way through checkpoints and unwittingly into dangerous situations, Chick sees a lot more of the war than he ever anticipated – spending a terrifying time in the Demilitarized Zone and getting caught up in Saigon during the Tet Offensive.

With indomitable spirit, Chick survives on his wits, but what he finds in Vietnam comes as a shock. By the end of his epic adventure, battered and exhausted, Chick finds himself questioning why his friends were ever led into the war in the first place.

The definitive work on the Vietnam War, the conflict that came to define a generation, told from all sides by those who were there.

More than forty years after the Vietnam War ended, its legacy continues to fascinate, horrify and inform us. As the first war to be fought in front of TV cameras and beamed around the world, it has been immortalised on film and on the page, and forever changed the way we think about war.

Drawing on hundreds of brand new interviews, Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward have created the definitive work on Vietnam. It is the first book to show us the war from every perspective: from idealistic US Marines and the families they left behind to the Vietnamese civilians, both North and South, whose homeland was changed for ever; politicians, POWs and anti-war protesters; and the photographers and journalists who risked their lives to tell the truth. The book sends us into the grit and chaos of combat, while also expertly outlining the complex chain of political events that led America to Vietnam.

Beautifully written, this essential work tells the full story without taking sides and reminds us that there is no single truth in war. It is set to redefine our understanding of a brutal conflict, to launch provocative new debates and to shed fresh light on the price paid in ‘blood and bone’ by Vietnamese and Americans alike.