No Man's Land

Herman Cyril McNeileProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.5
Word count
425K words
Chapters
43

Tags

English Originals War and Military Fiction Suspense ThrillerMilitary StrategyPower GameHeroismEspionagePersonal CharismaHuman NatureMounting DangerPatriotismThrilling Narrative

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. No Man's Land by H. C. McNeile. Author: McNeile, H. C. (Herman Cyril), 1888-1937. Language: English. Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature. Release Date: Dec 16, 2007

Editor's review

No Man's Land is an English novel by the British author H. C. McNeile and a classic public-domain work in the Project Gutenberg free eBook collection. McNeile was known for adventure and military fiction, and this book continues his hallmarks of brisk pacing and vivid scenes, with a story built around wartime situations and human choices. For general readers it offers both a feel for early twentieth-century popular English fiction and, through its characters' fates, a sense of how war affects individual lives. As a public-domain eBook it is easy to obtain and moderate in length, making it suitable as introductory or intermediate reading in the original English, and as further reading for those interested in British popular fiction around the First World War. While reading, pay attention to shifts in narrative perspective and the portrayal of characters through dialogue, as these are key to understanding the author's style.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read a chapter straight through first to grasp the narrative rhythm, then revisit the dialogue to note tone and stance
  2. Keep a vocabulary notebook for military and period-related terms, looking them up as you read
  3. Read alongside public resources on British society during World War I to better understand the characters' situations
  4. After finishing, try summarizing the main storyline in two or three sentences to check your grasp of plot and theme

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43

FAQ

Is this book in the original English, and how difficult is it to read? This is an English public-domain eBook released by Project Gutenberg. The language is early twentieth-century English, with period features in sentence structure and word choice. Overall it is at the difficulty level of popular fiction, and readers with intermediate English reading ability can finish it with the help of a dictionary.
Can I understand it without background knowledge of military history? Yes. The novel centers on characters and plot, and background knowledge mainly deepens understanding without affecting the main storyline. If you want a fuller sense of the characters' situations, a brief look at basic facts about British society during World War I before reading can help.
What is the best way to read the electronic edition? Project Gutenberg offers formats such as plain text, suitable for reading on a phone, tablet, or e-reader. A reading app that supports dictionary lookup and annotation is recommended, as it makes it easy to record vocabulary and reactions and to revisit key chapters.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Herman Cyril McNeile Author · British · 1888–1937

Herman Cyril McNeile, better known by the pen name "Sapper," was a British soldier and writer, born in Bodmin, Cornwall, in 1888 and died in 1937. He served in the Royal Engineers during the First World War, and after the war drew on his trench experiences in his writing. In 1920 he published Bull-dog Drummond, launching a famous series of popular adventure novels and becoming one of Britain's best-selling popular authors between the two world wars. The library holds three of his works—No Man's Land, Men, Women and Guns, and Mufti—whose subjects are largely related to war experience and military life. His plain, fast-paced style combines suspenseful plotting with popular appeal. His writing had some influence on the development of British popular adventure fiction, and the tough-guy image he created offered a reference point for later works of the same kind.