The Great War

During the First World War just under a million British people died – a figure so huge that it becomes almost meaningless. It feels impossible to give it a human context. Consequently we struggle to truly grasp the impact this devastating conflict must have had on people’s day-to-day lives. We resort to looking the war in general terms, treating the events as distant, viewing them in terms of their political or military significance.

The Great War: The People's Story is entirely different. Like the all-star ITV series it accompanies, it completely immerses the reader in the everyday experiences of real people who lived through the war. Using letters, diaries, newspapers and parish records – many of which have never been published – Izzy Charman has painstakingly reconstructed the lives of people such as separated newly-weds Alan and Dorothy Lloyd, plucky enlisted factory-worker Reg Evans and proudly independent suffragette-sympathiser Kate Parry Frye. Their stories are retold in intimate detail, offering a uniquely personal and powerfully moving account of the conflict.

The Great War: The People's Story is both a meticulously researched piece of narrative history and an incredibly moving remembrance of the extraordinary acts of extremely ordinary people.