In 1918, field nurse Laura Iven returns to Belgium to uncover the truth about her brother Freddie's supposed death in combat, while Freddie, unable to return to the killing fields, take refuge with a mysterious man who has the power to make the hellscape of the trenches disappear.
Discharged World War I nurse Laura Ivan has lost everything. Her parents were killed in a fatal explosion that destroyed her home and now her brother Freddie’s material possessions have been sent to her from the battlefield.
Oddly, though, no telegraph had been sent ahead of Freddie informing her of his death. When she reaches out to her connections still in the war, they all seem to give her roundabout answers and only say that he disappeared on the battlefield and is presumed dead. How then, she wonders, did they have his uniform to send back to her.
Chasing answers about her brother’s death, Laura travels back overseas and back into danger. Nothing is as it seems and she is constantly being chased by her mother’s ghost. Is this her conscious conjuring the image or is the ghost really there and trying to torment her? Or perhaps tell her something?
Throughout the novel, we also see hints and traces to the presence of a mysterious, and possibly sinister, stranger.
This book gave me a lot of feelings that I will be sorting through for a long, long time. The book does have some action in it, via some war battle scenes. However, it is predominately about the torn and raw psyche of those who have been involved in the horrors of war. This makes it, to me, infinitely more terrifying than some of the traditional ghost stories that I’ve come across. The reader, and the characters within the novel, are never quite sure if what they are seeing is really there or if it is simply madness from the nightmare they have been living.
For someone who couldn’t possibly have seen any of WWI, Arden’s writing is effective in capturing the horrors those who experienced it first-hand could have encountered. - Brittany, Branch Associate
Comentarios