The stunning third novel from the bestselling author of The Piano Tuner. As the First World War devastates Europe, The Winter Soldier is the story of one man thrust, utterly unprepared, into a remote medical outpost in the Carpathian mountains, and the woman that is set to save him.

'Held me by the throat from the first lyrical page to the last' Emma Donoghue, author of Room


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, only to find himself posted to a remote field-hospital ravaged by typhus. Supplies have all but run out, the other doctors have fled, and only a single nurse remains, 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 course of his life.

From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front, The Winter Soldier is the story of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, and of the mistakes we make and the precious opportunities to atone.


'One of the best books I've ever read' Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory
'A tour-de-force' Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone
'One of the finest prose stylists in American fiction' New York Times

A touching, intensely human story of longing and love