The Missing of the Somme

A deeply personal meditation on remembrance, art, and World War I by the legendary Geoff Dyer, reissued with a new introduction by Drew Gilpin Faust

The Missing of the Somme is part travelogue, part meditation on remembrance—and completely, unabashedly unlike any other book about the First World War. Through visits to battlefields and memorials, Geoff Dyer examines the way that photographs and film, poetry and prose, determined—sometimes in advance of the events described—the way we would think about and remember the war. With his characteristic originality and insight, Dyer untangles and reconstructs the network of myth and memory that illuminates our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War. Reissued with a new introduction, The Missing of the Somme stands as one of Dyer’s classic works.