Across the capitals of Europe, no one really understood the calamity that was about to erupt in the summer of 1914. The Great War, however, would become a truly global war – stretching from Europe to Oceania to the Middle East to North America, affecting millions of civilians as well as soldiers and governments. For the first time the world was faced with the fact that neutrality was practically impossible. Understanding such a complex conflict is difficult in itself, but has been made even more so by a repeatedly blinkered approach to the history of it, focusing almost entirely on English-language sources, and has also persistently viewed the conflict through traditional prisms – the Eastern Front, and the Western Front. Such an approach precludes any address, for example, of the fact that the first British shots fired were in North Africa, by a black man, or that the first Australian casualties occurred in the Pacific. In a remarkable new narrative, Ring of Fire will resolve these misconceptions to describe this first pivotal year of the war, that would eventually reshape nations, empires and continents.

Travelling throughout Europe, the authors have gained access to an enormous quantity of primary material largely untouched by general histories. From this trove they will tell the story of 1914 with verve, empathy, and an eye on presenting a truly comprehensive and inclusive popular history of the war. This will be a people's view of the war, using unparalleled access to primary sources and collective knowledge of nine languages, Ring of Fire will tell a pacy, touching, and relentlessly surprising narrative of a year we all think we know.