Dead Leaves - Two Years in the Rhodesian War
by Dan Wylie

It is January 1978. Groups of nervous, dutiful white conscripts begin their National Service with the Rhodesian security forces. Ian Smith's white minority government is in its dying days and negotiations towards majority rule are already under way. For these 18-year-old rookies there is nothing to do but go on fighting, hold the line while the transition happens around them. Dead Leaves is a richly textured memoir in which an ordinary young soldier grapples with the unique dilemmas presented by an extraordinary period in history: the inner spectres of inner violence and death; the pressurised arrival of manhood; and the place of conscience, friendship and beauty in the pervasive atmosphere of futile warfare.

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