The Winter Soldier

Winner of the Northern California Book AwardA New York Times Editors Choice PickA Washington Post Notable Book of 2018A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2018An NPR Best Book of 2018 National Bestseller The Winter Soldier brims with improbable narrative pleasures...These pages crackle with excitement... A spectacular success. Anthony Marra New York Times Book Review A dream of a novel... Part mystery part war story part romance. Anthony Doerr author of All the Light We Cannot See Vienna 1914. Lucius is a twentytwoyearold medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery he enlists expecting a position at a wellorganized field hospital. But when he arrives at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains he finds a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have fled and only a single mysterious nurse named Sister Margarete remains. But Lucius has never lifted a surgeons scalpel. And as the war rages across the winter landscape he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal makeshift medicine. Then one day an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor patient and nurse forever. From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front from hardscrabble operating rooms to battlefields thundering with Cossack cavalry The Winter Soldier is the story of war and medicine of family of finding love in the sweeping tides of history and finally of the mistakes we make and the precious opportunities to atone.