After Kafra

by Martin Malone

An award-winning novelist, playwright and short fiction writer, Martin Malone also served six tours as a peacekeeper in the Middle East. This tough story of the returned soldier, fitting into the rubric of post-conflict literature, has been described by The Independent as, “Powerful, truthful and harrowing.” This is its 2nd edition. "After Kafra" explores post-traumatic stress syndrome, the difficulties for an individual who has experienced war to settle back to a “normal” life and how the lives of anyone who has lived in a combat zone are affected forever by the experience. “He is home, but not home.   His mind is elsewhere, his grey eyes on Lebanese soil, his nostrils taking in the rich red earth baked by the hot khamsin winds ... ” Big boys don’t cry. And soldiers who return from war are expected to slot back into the old routines of home and work without complaint. Yet since his return from Lebanon, UN Peacekeeper Sergeant Harry Kyle finds himself on the edge of emotional turmoil daily, haunted by an atrocity in a remote village. Struggling to chase away demons that his wife and children can’t even imagine, alcohol numbs the horror, but chips away at his self esteem and his health.  His wife is no longer there for him and at every turn he finds ugliness and a lack of purpose that begins to destroy him. Tough, heart breaking and a great read to boot, After Kafra is a timely new edition in 2018.

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Martin Malone is an Irish short story writer and novelist.
Prior to his writing career, Malone served as a military policeman in the Irish Defence Forces, with postings in Lebanon and Iraq. His memoir The Lebanon Diaries: An Irish Soldier's Story (2006) documents these experiences.
Two of his novels, After Kafra (2001) and The Broken Cedar (2003, longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), draw on Malone's time as a UNIFIL peacekeeper stationed along the Lebanon-Israel border.
His other novels are The Silence of the Glasshouse (2008), and Us (2000); both are set in Ireland.
Malone's short stories have won several literary awards in Ireland. His first collection, The Mango Wars and Other Stories, was published in 2009.
He has also written several plays broadcast on RTE Radio 1 Ireland.