The Winter Soldier
<b>The epic story of war and medicine from the award-winning author of <i>The Piano Tuner </i>is "a dream of a novel...part mystery, part war story, part romance" (Anthony Doerr, author of <i>All the Light We Cannot See</i>). </b><br /><br />Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized 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.<br /><br />But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's 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.<br /><br />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, <i>The Winter Soldier</i> 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.<br /><br />"<i>The Winter Soldier</i> brims with improbable narrative pleasures...These pages crackle with excitement... A spectacular success." —Anthony Marra, <i>New York Times Book Review</i>