The Beauty and the Sorrow is Swedish author Peter Englund’s extraordinary new history of the first world war, which follows the lives of 20 people caught up in the conflict. Among them are an American ambulance driver, an English nurse in the Russian army, a South American adventurer fighting for the Turks, a 12-year-old German girl and several other civilians. In the course of 227 short chapters (some of them no more than a page long), they take turns to tell us what they saw or felt on a given day. Interspersed with authorial commentary, their testimonies make up a haunting chronicle, and a convocation of ghosts, an article in The Guardian says.

The book is thick with other forebodings of the WWI. A dapper Ottoman official, on orders from his paymasters in Constantinople, stands calmly by as Kurds bestially slaughter Armenian Christians in present-day Turkey. "He represents a new species in the bestiary of the young century," says Englund – that of the well-dressed, articulate mass murderer who condemns thousands to death at the mere stroke of a pen. In Nazi Germany such bureaucrats would become known as Schreibtischtäter – "desk-murderers". Apprenticeship in Ottoman obedience in April 1915 required a stunted moral imagination; lack of imagination (not sadism) had made the official cruel, the article says.

The Beauty and the Sorrow is a chronicle of human loss, atrocity and famine. What happened at the Marne, in the Ottoman province of Armenia, on the Gallipoli peninsula, at Ypres, in the Piave and on the Asiago plateau was tragic, inhuman, it says.