It is 1918. The Great War is dragging on in mud and filth and blood.
In Halifax, Canada, nurse Laura is struggling with tragedies of her own. She had been a nurse in Belgium but was sent home after her hospital was bombed. She then lost her mother when a ship in the harbour exploded.
Her brother Freddie - a solider - is lost somewhere overseas, presumed dead.
However, Freddie isn't dead. Trapped in a pillbox with a German soldier that Freddie only knows as Winter, they fight their way out and across No Man's Land against extraordinary odds.
However, they can't survive alone, and there's a very bad man with a violin who is looking for stories ...
The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a lot of things - it's a family saga in a way, as Laura and Freddie fight to find each other. It's a war story in the most intimate and tragic sense of the word, and it's a love story, with as many layers to that description as you can think of.
It's also a ghost story, and blindingly beautiful and tragic.
Katherine Arden wrote The Winternight Trilogy, which I did greatly enjoy.
But The Warm Hands of Ghosts is on another level of elevation, and I loved it.