Pristina, Kosovo, 1999. Barry Ashton, recently divorced, has been deployed as a civil engineer attached to the Royal Engineers corps in the British Army. In an extraordinary feat of ventriloquism, Adam Mars-Jones constructs a literary story with a thoroughly unliterary narrator, and a narrative that is anything but comic through the medium of a character who, essentially, is. Exploring masculinity, class and identity, BatlavaLake is a brilliant story of men and war by one of Britain's most accomplished writers.

'No one inhabits character as intensely and subtly as Mars-Jones. Batlava Lake is therefore completely convincing as an everyman narrative - we know people exactly like Barry Ashton, and may even be exactly like him - but there's a larger truth here too, about clashes of cultures and history, that make this an important and highly recommended book.'- Lee Child