Winner of the 2011 European Union Prize for Literature

At the age of nineteen they handed you a rifle with a bayonet and dressed you up in a uniform ... and somehow, you managed to get your hands on a little, dark brown notebook and a pen.

After the funeral, a grieving son starts reading the diary his dead father had kept during the Second World War. As he turns each page, searching for a trace of the man he remembers, a portrait of an individual unfolds; a figure made both strange and familiar through the handwritten observations, the yearnings and the confessions.

Immanuel Mifsud tells a moving story of pain, warfare, and the things that connect us. As the narrator explores the diary and his own memories, he begins to recognise the man behind the words, the father whose death could release the truth of his life.

Translated by: Albert Gatt