Juniper

 

 

Books

Juniper Books

 

“A great theme and taut story telling: I much enjoyed it.”

Andrew Marr

“Isaac Rosenberg was one of the great soldier poets of the First World War. Unlike Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves, he was not an officer but a private soldier. He was also Jewish. He died obscurely in the German offensive of March 1918. I hope that this illuminating book will help restore him to a deserved position of honour and equality with the others.”

Martin Bell

“This is a powerful and very moving account of the life and death of a Jewish poet who had already suffered so much and then joined the army only to experience the horror and brutality of the trenches, dying there as millions did.

“The novel tells us so much about persecution and despair in the life of one very talented young man, cut down before his full talents could be developed and recognised.”

Tony Benn

“In Beating for Light, Akers uses a number of sources and datum points and joins the dots skilfully with his own prose. The dialogue, the characterisation, the action, the sex: these are all fleshed out by the imagination of the author…

Akers performs a double service. Historical novels, if they are to be of any greater merit than the Archers, must tell something of a person or period we don’t know already. Akers paints a vivid picture of Rosenberg the person. One is struck with the unrelieved melo-misery, but this is probably not far from the truth. It is a good story well told. He also helps us to interpret Rosenberg’s poetry…

Some use the lecture hall; others use biography: Akers’ medium is historical fiction. Notwithstanding the impossibility of their tasks, all succeed in advancing our understanding and we are the richer for their efforts.”

Ian Gardiner, Scotland on Sunday

“It would be churlish to criticise the legacy and achievements of great war writers and poets such as Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves but Isaac Rosenberg’s poetry deserves the same status. Akers’ elegiac biography of the young poet includes much of his work. Hopefully, this powerful retelling of the story of a Jewish man who died at 28 will elevate his status.”

Michael Tierney, The Herald

“Geoff Akers, a Scottish academic and writer, well versed in the poetry of the First World War, has taken Rosenberg’s life for the subject of a novel. The result is an imaginative and poignant story of the growth of an artist’s mind, and the tribulations of a soldier’s career. Much is made of the sensitivities of so private a man. It makes vivid reading, and when it comes to the poems of the trenches, sets them precisely in their context with all the gritty detail of their inspiration. The story makes the most of its subject and the book comes with serious endorsements by political heavyweights of today.”

Jewish Book Week

“Meticulously researched, blending fact with fiction, the book delves into the man behind the poet. Well written and very accessible.”

Lovereading

“At the heart of the novel, Akers draws a sensitive picture of the aspiring poet… He has written a valuable and moving account, which will surely create interest in the life of Isaac Rosenberg.”

Ian Jenkins, Peeblesshire News

“Beating for Light is an extremely well-written and worthwhile work that will appeal especially to those readers who have found tragedy and beauty in Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong or Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. Like these other novels, Beating for Light makes us realise that war – with all its waste, horror and futility – has, too, a human face.”

Paul Kane, The Compulsive Reader