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** PRE ORDER NOW ** DUE FOR RELEASE OCTOBER 2026 **

Over one hundred thousand copies sold worldwide — now published in its complete, unabridged edition.

Where courage struggled, mateship endured, and survival was never certain.

Written by returned Australian soldier Private Edward Lynch, Somme Mud stands as one of the most powerful accounts of the First World War. Drafted in pencil across twenty school exercise books in the late 1920s and preserved against the odds, it is a work born directly from lived experience.

First published to wide acclaim and selling over one hundred thousand copies worldwide, this edition presents Lynch’s story in its complete and unabridged form, restoring more than 50,000 words and offering the fullest version of this remarkable work.

Told through the voice of ‘Nulla’, Lynch’s fictionalised self, the narrative follows seven Australian soldiers from their departure from Sydney to the battlefields of France and Belgium. What unfolds is not a story of glory, but of endurance — of young, powerless men navigating a landscape defined by cold, exhaustion and constant danger.

From the frozen trenches of the Somme winter to the grinding offensives of 1917 and the final advance of 1918, Nulla and his mates move through the defining campaigns of the war. As a battalion runner, he crosses shattered ground under fire, carrying messages through terrain littered with the dead — a role where survival is uncertain and every journey may be the last.

Moments of humour and defiance sit alongside hardship, offering insight into the character of the Australian soldiers and the bonds that sustained them. These glimpses of life beyond the front line give the narrative depth and humanity, revealing not just the brutality of war but the resilience of those who endured it.

Spanning the Somme, Bullecourt, Ypres, Passchendaele and the Allied advance, Somme Mud captures both the scale of the conflict and the experience of those who lived through it. Immediate, unsentimental and deeply human, it remains one of the defining Australian accounts of the Western Front

‘[Lynch] has left a mighty tribute to his mates, an epic of his generation and a great gift to his country. I wish I have met him.’ Bill Gammage

“A defining account of the Australian experience in the Great War.”

“Uncompromising, vivid and enduring.”