Melvin Burgess

Praise for the Skinback Fusiliers.

Michael Rosen:

Daring, immediate, painful, powerful. It's the stuff we've got to confront in order to figure out what is being done in our name. There's no point in delivering up sanitized stuff. It won't tell us anything.

Melvin Burgess:

The Skinback Fusiliers is an important book about how we lure our young men into the armed forces, how we train them, how we treat them while they're there and how we treat them when they come out.  The occasional bits and pieces of bad behaviour that emerge on the news are, as always, the tip of the iceberg and this is a timely reminder than any organisation that trains people to be killers is going to have a dirty side - something which we all find it easy to forget when we want to go to war.  If this is the kind of thing we visit on our own forces, it's worth asking what kind of damage we're inflicting on the many equally innocent people who get caught up in our military adventures abroad.

Next time you see an ad on the TV suggesting the armed forces are like some kind of adventure playground for men, think again.

John Thompson (critic and legal draughtsman): It was a little like watching a car crash, horrifying but compulsive viewing.

Frank Cottrell Boyce: Reading this book gave me a feeling of inescapable immediacy. It's so vivid and it really buttonholes you and the prose is so urgent and gripping. Envious. It's bloody fantastic.

Laurence Boswell, director/writer, Royal Shakespeare Co., West End, Broadway:

Very powerful, very tough, people should know this stuff. Loved that you could make room for the joy of a great curry, amidst all the violence and the bullying. Thanks.

Robin Thornber, Guardian theatre reviewer:

Absolutely brilliant, and utterly terrifying. Horrific.

Carl Grose, writer, director at Kneehigh Theatre, actor/writer for National Theatre and Radio 3:

BRILLIANT. It's one of the most startling, shocking, funny, tragic, and truly political books I've ever read about this country.