Brutal battles in the icy wastes of the Eastern Front are lit at night by burning magnesium flares. This gripping novel of war, and the timeless ethos of the warrior, follows Arno Greif, a Swedish volunteer in the German Army. Come with him, from the heady advances of 1941 through to the bitter fighting in the ruins of the Reich in 1945.

Burning Magnesium has clear echoes not just of Junger’s Storm of Steel but also of Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914. Author Lennart Svensson plunges his readers deep into both the operational details of World War Two combat and the mind of the fighting man.

By several near miraculous quirks of Fate, Arno survives the war, but the psychological and spiritual impact stays with him in the years that follow. Vivid flashbacks and a myriad of well-researched details repeatedly hurl both Arno and the reader back into his wartime world of attack and counter-attack, clattering tanks, the chink of empty brass cases, bloodstained snow and the screams of dying men.

Written without sentimentality or judgement, Burning Magnesium gives a long-overdue human dimension to the men who fought for Germany in the most brutal and decisive theatre of the Second World War.