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Summary
Summary
The epic story of war and medicine from the award-winning author of North Woods and The Piano Tuner is "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 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.
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.
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.
" The Winter Soldier brims with improbable narrative pleasures...These pages crackle with excitement... A spectacular success." --Anthony Marra, New York Times Book Review
Author Notes
Daniel Mason is the author of the collection A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth , a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the California Book Award, and three novels, including The Winter Soldier and The Piano Tuner . His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages and awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize for Fiction, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is an assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Mason's moving historical novel (after The Piano Tuner), Lucius Krzelewski is a 22-year-old, upper-class medical student in 1914 Vienna who, after Austria enters World War I, volunteers for duty. Despite his lack of practical experience, he is sent to a field hospital in the Carpathian Mountains, where he is expected to perform emergency surgeries. Fortunately, he is guided by Sister Margarete, a nurse with a mysterious background who teaches him the surgical skills he lacks. They go on to become lovers. One day, they are given a new patient, a shell-shocked soldier who can only communicate by drawing pictures. Lucius becomes obsessed with finding a cure for this patient, who is dubbed the winter soldier. Then, Margarete disappears and Lucius gets lost looking for her. He is transferred to another medical unit, then is returned home to Vienna. But despite an arranged marriage, Lucius can't go on with his life until he finds out what happened to Margarete and the winter soldier. Mason's old-fashioned novel delivers a sweeping yet intimate account of WWI, and in Lucius, the author has created an outstanding protagonist. Reminiscent of Thomas Keneally's Season in Purgatory, this novel is a fine addition to fictional testaments of doctors and nurses during wartime. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A novel of love, war, and medicine set during the grim final two years of World War I.Medical student Lucius Krzelewski, born in Vienna to a well-to-do Polish family, is pressed into service as a doctor in the desperate year of 1914. He reports to an improvised field hospitalactually a churchin Lemnowice, located in a remote section of the Carpathian Mountains in eastern Europe, and there is expected to do far more than his modest clinical experience has trained him for. Up till that point he had never operated, and one of the two cures he had effected involved a patient with impacted earwax, but now he faces soldiers dying of typhus and needing amputations. In part assisting him, but largely teaching him, is Margarete, a nurse from the Sisters of St. Catherine. The medical tasks she performs are both complex and wearying, but gradually she tutors Lucius, and he gains more confidence in the difficult operations he must perform in appalling conditions. Mason then turns the narrative in a direction we've come to expect, for love and war are intimately connected: Lucius and Margarete become lovers, and a halcyon period ensues in which their romantic liaison briefly disengages them from some of the traumas of war. But one day Margarete disappears, and in following after her, Lucius gets entangled with the moving front of the war. He eventually makes his way back home, has a brief and unsatisfactory marriage, and then tries to find his long-lost love. Along the way he must deal with a major mysterywhether she in fact had been a nun at all.Mason's contribution to war literature involves almost no depiction of fighting but rather its aftermath, the tragically scarred soldiers, and the almost equally traumatized caregivers who sacrifice their health in providing medical help to the wounded. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Their love was impossible in more ways than one. A medical student from Vienna sent to a makeshift hospital during WWI is instantly amazed by the no-nonsense nun who had been nursing injured soldiers with little help for months. Lucius' medical-school training attending lectures and reading books did almost nothing to prepare him for the horrors of tending to shell-shocked soldiers, not to mention the plague of lice and rats all around; but as Sister Margarete gently guides him, their relationship slowly grows into something deeper. Beyond the constant threat of the ever-shifting front and Margarete's own vows, however, the arrival of one patient who seems almost beyond rescue will test them severely. A sweeping story of love found and lost, steeped in medical details that reveal the full horrors that ill-equipped doctors and nurses faced over years of vicious trench warfare, The Winter Soldier is a vivid account of one man caught up in the epic forces of war, who desperately fights against the tides of change in search of redemption.--Bridget Thoreson Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MY STRUGGLE: Book 6, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken. (Archipelago, $33.) This hefty volume concludes the Norwegian author's mammoth autobiographical novel with lengthy exegeses on art, literature, poetry and Hitler (whose "Mein Kampf" gives Knausgaard his title). LAKE SUCCESS, by Gary Shteyngart. (Random House, $28.) Shteyngart's prismatic new road-trip novel stars a Wall Street finance bro, loaded down with job and family woes, who impulsively hops on a Greyhound bus headed west. We do not root for him, but we root for his comeuppance. THE FIELD OF BLOOD: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, by Joanne B. Freeman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) A noted historian uncovers the scores of brawls, stabbings, pummelings and duel threats that occurred among congressmen between 1830 and 1860. The mayhem was part of the ever-escalating tensions over slavery. OHIO, by Stephen Markley. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) This debut novel, set at a class reunion, churns with such ambitious social statements and insights - on hot-button issues of the past dozen years - that at times it feels like a kind of fiction/op-ed hybrid. HIS FAVORITES, by Kate Walbert. (Scribner, $22.) A middle-aged woman recalls, haltingly, how she was groomed by a charismatic high school English teacher in this powerful novel of trauma and survival that couldn't be more timely. The looping narrative amounts to a cathartic experiment in taking control of one's own story. IMMIGRANT, MONTANA, by Amitava Kumar. (Knopf, $25.95.) Kumar's novel of a young Indian immigrant who recounts his loves lost and won as a college student in the early 1990s has the feeling of thinly veiled memoir. It's a deeply honest look at a budding intellectual's new experience of America, filled with both alienation and an aching desire to connect. PASSING FOR HUMAN: A Graphic Memoir, by Liana Finek. (Random House, $28.) Finck's cartoons in The New Yorker offer dispatches from an eccentric, anxious mind. Her memoir grapples with what it means to accept your own weirdness and separation from a world that doesn't understand you. THE WINTER SOLDIER, by Daniel Mason. (Little, Brown, $28.) In this crackling World War I novel, a young medical student is dispatched to a desolate hamlet on the Eastern Front, where he teams with a rifle-wielding nun to treat soldiers. THE ASSASSINATION OF BRANGWAIN SPURGE, by M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin. (Candlewick, $24.99; ages 10 and up.) In this wildly original book (a National Book Award contender), emissaries of the feuding elf and goblin kingdoms seek peace. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Library Journal Review
When war breaks out in 1914, Lucius, a promising medical student, enlists in the Imperial Austrian Army and ends up stranded in a typhus-ridden outpost in the Carpathian Mountains. The other doctors have fled. There is only a nurse, Sister -Margarete, who becomes his aide and teacher as he learns medicine in the act of practicing it. A soldier is brought in with no visible wounds: he won't eat or talk. Lucius and Margarete nurse him back to fragile health. Then the Hussars arrive, and their officer sees only a malingerer, a soldier with no visible wounds. The officer's brutal treatment of the patient undoes all the good that has been done: a man who was damaged only on the inside is left damaged on the outside, too. The soldier is taken away and Lucius is consumed with guilt for failing to intervene. Margarete and Lucius fall in love, but she, too, disappears. The rest of the novel is about Lucius's three-year hunt to find her. VERDICT Mason's (psychiatry, Stanford; A Far Country) lyrical and affecting novel about the costs of war and lost love will satisfy readers of quality fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 3/12/18.]-David Keymer, Cleveland © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
