The Winter Soldier

Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a 22-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, & 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, & 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 & medicine, of family, of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, & finally, of the mistakes we make, & the precious opportunities to atone.

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DANIEL MASON is the author of The Piano Tuner, A Far Country, & A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His work has been translated into 28 languages, adapted for opera & the stage, & awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, & a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His short stories have been awarded 2 Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award, & an O. Henry Prize.