Michael forbes

The book’s title is a reference to the rule employed by marines to check for explosive devices upon arriving at a site: a bomb within five metres of the convoy will kill everyone in the vehicle, a device within twenty-five metres has potential to kill the scouts investigating the road up ahead.

Michael draws on his own experience of re-adjusting to life after service, having completed two tours of Iraq as a communications officer in the marine corp. Fives and Twenty Fives has been described as 'an authentic and evocative novel about the many battlefields that soldiers face' by Dominic Tierney, author of How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires and the American Way of War, who has hailed Michael as 'an important new voice in the literature on war.'