Book description
From the author of the top ten bestseller The Junior Officers'
Reading Club.
When Patrick Hennessey returned home from Afghanistan, battle-worn,
exhilarated, unsure if he'd see anything like it in his life again, he
left behind him bands of friendship forged in the heat of the moment
between living and dying. The comrades he left furthest behind were
Qiam, Syed and Majhib. They are still there in the dust and heat of
Helmand, soldiers fighting for their homeland.
KANDAK is the story of how these lasting bonds were made.
Written in the spare and lucid prose of Junior Officers' Reading
Club, Patrick Hennessey tells of their comically bad first
meetings, the mutual suspicion, incomprehension and cultural divides
that characterise early interactions between British and Afghan
soldiers, to the moments under fire when those divides can, sometimes,
cross chaos and culture shocks to turn into brotherhood. An account of
friendship and loss, of warriors and soldiers, KANDAK explores
the reasons men pick up the sword, and how in the intensity of battle,
unlikely alliances can be formed.
Patrick Hennessey was born in 1982 and educated at Berkhamsted School
and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read English. On leaving
university he joined the Army and served from 2004 to 2009 as an officer
in The Grenadier Guards. In between guarding towers, castles and palaces
he worked in the Balkans, Africa, South East Asia, the Falkland Islands
and deployed on operational tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. On leaving
the Army he wrote his first book
The Junior Officers' Reading Club
, a memoir of a brief but eventful stint in uniform. He is now a
barrister.
