The Winter Soldier

By Daniel Mason,

Book cover of The Winter Soldier

Book description

The epic story of war and medicine from the award-winning author of 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…

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Why read it?

3 authors picked The Winter Soldier as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Mason is a beautiful writer. It felt like each sentence was deliberated over before its final form was inscribed. But I think I connected with the book because, like the main character, I was a physician. I never had to confront whether what I learned in the lecture hall and anatomy lab was useless or meaningless, and therefore, I never had to question everything.

That’s what Lucius must do, and it gave me the opportunity to approach such questions within my own life. Are my medical gods real, worthy, or false because they can only exist in the most advantageous…

Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier is superb. I love its wonderfully drawn characters and visual details, its sense of medical authenticity, its depiction of the convolutions of history—in this case, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s side of things in WWI. It’s all held within a heart-wrenching narrative about a Viennese medical student assigned to a distant field hospital in the Carpathian Mountains. What he finds is a village church turned into a makeshift hospital with a single nurse in charge. The author, a physician, creates so well the terror of a medical student facing, for the first time, what his textbooks couldn’t…

From Joanna's list on WWI Angels of Mercy.

This harrowing description of WWI French army medical teams fighting to save lives in a remote landscape, cut off by winter conditions, threatened with enemy actions and meager supplies is, believe it or not, a love story. Describing the life of a young volunteer doctor from a well-to-do family in Paris who chooses to volunteer for this remote and hazardous post rather than find a safe job (his mother’s preference), the cold, the slogging forest denuded of summer green, the horrible injuries, madness, and futility the Hero of the story encounters will make you reach for a hot cup of…

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Book cover of Caesar’s Soldier

Caesar’s Soldier By Alex Gough,

Who was the man who would become Caesar's lieutenant, Brutus' rival, Cleopatra's lover, and Octavian's enemy? 

When his stepfather is executed for his involvement in the Catilinarian conspiracy, Mark Antony and his family are disgraced. His adolescence is marked by scandal and mischief, his love affairs are fleeting, and yet,…

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