Following the huge success of his previous best-selling book Passchendaele: A New History, Dr Nick Lloyd, Reader in the Defence Studies Department, has secured a prestigious two-book deal with Viking to complete a trilogy on the First World War.

The first book The Western Front will be published on 4 March, with a launch event being held the same evening. Drawing upon the latest scholarship on the war, as well as wrongly overlooked first-person accounts, and archival material from every angle, Lloyd examines the most decisive campaigns of the Great War, and explains the achievements that have been too long obscured by legends of mud, blood and futility.

The Second title The Eastern Front, due 2024 turns to what Winston Churchill called the ‘unknown war’, with Lloyd surveying the vast conflict in Eastern Europe and the Balkans that brought about the collapse of three empires.

The Wider War, due 2027 will complete the trilogy by telling the story of the struggle in Africa and the Middle East. Although the ill-fated Gallipoli expedition of 1915 remains well-known, the rest of the campaign against Ottoman Turkey, which ranged from Egypt and Mesopotamia to the mountains of the Caucasus, is only remembered in fragments. He will develop the story of this truly global conflict and its repercussions today for the first time.

Dr Nick Lloyd is Reader in Military & Imperial History in the Defence Studies Department and Academic Director of the RAF Division. Nick has written widely on military and imperial history in the era of the Great War and has published four books including the bestselling Passchendaele: A New History (Viking, 2017). This was shortlisted for the British Army Military Book of the Year, the Military History Monthly Book of the Year, and was chosen as one of the Telegraph's '50 Best Books of 2017'.