A few months ago, fourteen-year-old Ali Banana was apprenticed to a whip-wielding blacksmith in his rural hometown. Now it’s winter 1944: the war is entering its most crucial stage, and Ali is a private in Thunder Brigade. His unit has been given orders to go behind enemy lines and wreak havoc, but the Burmese jungle is a mud-riven, treacherous place riddled with Japanese snipers, insanity and disease.

Burma Boy is a horrific, vividly realised account of the madness, the sacrifice, and the dark humour of the Second World War’s most vicious battleground. It’s also the moving story of a boy trying to live long enough to become a man.