Tuesday 4 June 2024

Review - The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

 

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.

1 comment:

  1. I stay away from ghost stories, especially tragic ones. Glad this one was a good read for you.

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