Drinking Water Chemistry

Stephen Brookes grew up in a privileged world in the twilight of Empire. The son of a British army surgeon and a Burmese mother, he lived in the pretty hill station of Maymo in central Burma in a house with airy verandas surrounded by perfect lawns. But one sunny day in 1942, as Brookes lazed in the branches of a cherry tree, he spotted 'dozens of silver birds in arrow formation' against the Cloudless sky. Before he knew it, Japanese bombs were dropping all around him. From that moment on, his life was never the same. To escape the Japanese advance, his family fled towards India with little more than the clothes on their backs. What ensued was a nightmarish journey of extreme suffering. Indeed, the events were so traumatising that only now, half-a-century on is Brookes able to speak of what occurred as he and his family struggled through malarial jungles flooded by monsoon rains. Through the Jungle of Death is a gripping tale of a boy suddenly confronted with the brutality and evil of war. Barefoot and still in his school uniform, Brookes struggles along a route littered with the dead and dying. Without medicine and little food, he and his family gradually grow weaker and are faced with the very real possibility of extinction. Overnight, the boy becomes a man. Deep within him, he discovers the courage and determination to survive. When confronted with a Chinese soldier set on relieving him of the family's last bowl of rice, he successfully fights him off. Yet he retains the resourcefulness of youth and while many of his peers waste away helplessly, he learns to fish using a Gurkha's kukri and forages in the jungle for fruit and grubs. A deeply moving story, this is a testament to human ingenuity and resilience even under the harshest circumstances. It has been written as much to record the suffering of the forgotten thousands who died in the jungles of Burma as for the author himself, still trying to come to terms with those terrible events. Review by Tarquin Hall (Kirkus UK)