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Fletcher Agency
Melissa Chinchillo
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THE WINTER SOLDIER

Daniel Philippe Mason

A sweeping, unforgettable love story of a young doctor and nurse at a remote field hospital in the First World War from the bestselling author of The Piano Tuner, translated in 28 languages.
Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War One 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.

Daniel Mason is a physician and author of the novels The Piano Tuner and A Far Country. His work has been translated into 28 languages, adapted for theatre, and produced as an opera in the Royal Opera House in London. The Piano Tuner was a New York Times and Washington Post Notable book, a Boston Globe Best Book of 2002, and NPR's best first novel of 2002. Worldwide, it has over one million copies in print. A Far Country was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Northern California Book Award. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University, where he teaches courses in the humanities and medicine. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California with his family.
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Published 2018-09-11 by Little Brown

Comments

A truly captivating and beautifully written love story set in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains during World War One. Lucius is a 22 year old medical student anxious to treat real patients when he enlists, leaving his aristocratic family in Vienna for an desolate outpost in a frozen and war ravaged village. Sister Margarete is the nurse in charge and quickly teaches Lucius the realities of medicine in wartime. An unforgettable story of love, loss and the power to heal.

As lyrical as a Viennese waltz and as delicate as crystal, Mason's riveting novel examines the human heart and the wounds of war with clear eyes and compassion.

The Winter Soldier is a deeply emotional story that walks the tight rope between the horrors of war and the healing power of love. I wasn't familiar with the PIANO TUNER but I am going to look for Daniel Mason's previous work. I'm placing this book in my customer's hand with a MUST READ order!

The depth and complexity of Daniel Mason' s new novel make for a remarkable read, though a fairly tough description. There's the basic themes of wartime love and horror, and more than enough loss: limbs and lives, innocence and empire. A whole world just vanishes in bombs, guns, and smoke, and the reader is left clutching at hints. Somehow, the richness of the story makes it uplifting rather than melancholy. Mason weaves a three dimensional tapestry of war and its consequences. Everything is below the surface; you sink down, discover something new at every turn, and come away refreshed. How does that happen with a war story? Don't ask; just read.

Mason's details are so masterfully woven into the action of the text that the reader a part of the story, rather than like an outsider observing it. The novel races along on the back of descriptive passages.. Mason crafts a beautiful finale in which the reader is forced to evaluate the balance of a love affair that is impossible and the freedom that comes with ultimately letting go of an obsession. Highly recommended.

Lyrical, romantic and at times heartbreaking, The Winter Soldier is the moving story of an inexperienced medical student conscripted to a skeletal field hospital during the First World War. In this brutal crucible, Lucius learns what he is capable of - hard work and determination, occasional heroism, and more often, human frailty. Against a bleak background of wartime hardship, this is a magnificent tale of resilience, atonement and love. You know it's a good one when you keep thinking about it 3 galleys later! I can't wait to put it in the hands of our customers.

Publishers Marketplace chose THE WINTER SOLDIER as one of its "Highly Anticipated" Buzz Books for Fall 2018 Read more...

In the tradition of Cold Mountain and Doctor Zhivago, Daniel Mason's new novel is a gloriously gripping story of love, war, and the marvel of human endurance. Sweeping yet intimate, brutal yet tender, it kept me up, it broke my heart, and it made me remember yet again just how a good book -- a really good book -- rekindles our love of life.

Terrific, moving, compelling. I was sorry to see it end. Mason makes war--that war, in that place (the Great War as it played out in the Austro-Hungarian empire near the Ukraine) palpable: you freeze, you itch (there's lice, lots of lice,) the misery is deeper and wider and bigger than the human mind can fathom). Mason weaves the newly minted idea of shell-shock--so new it's yet nameless--into this story (of love and loss and perhaps redemption) in a most natural and un-pedantic way. One could compare it to The Siege by Helen Dunmore--the environs, the marvelous descriptions of what war is.

A remarkable example of how a skilled writer can turn a dusty premise into a story bursting with vivid life...rendered with meticulous art...Mason's prose, however, flows like clear water, leaving us moved by these star-crossed lovers, and by the soldiers 'who seemed forever stuck in their eternal winters.'

Italian rights: Mondadori

"...urgent, cinematically beautiful third novel...like its predecessors (The Piano Tuner, A Far Country), fully qualifies as epic.Not only does Mason make every crumb of pertinent history, culture and geography so real throughout this saga that a reader feels instantly teleported into all of it: The Winter Soldier delivers, in shocking detail, a relentless inventory of the era's medical knowledge and practices.Mason seems, through this critical hinge in the story, to be asking us to consider with him a particular yet emblematic dilemma of ethics, science and ego. Against a tableau of human cruelty, kindness and ingenuity, art's part, too, is contemplated smuggled into the story in the form of materials stuffed inside the eponymous soldier's clothing.The Winter Soldier's settings (Vienna, countryside, peasant and military flight) are peopled by a terrific ensemble; meticulously drawn, all acted upon in their turns by the frantic compression of options during wartime. A romance seeded inside such straits can't not take on desperate stakes as will Lucius' later, monumental search for Margarete. One is reminded of a dozen greats: Dr. Zhivago, The English Patient, For Whom the Bell Tolls.deeply, memorably moving.wondrous and horrific.graceful and acute.Mason has created a magnificent world, urging us to savor every grain of it...Such passionate noticing is among reading's finest rewards. It's to Mason's abiding credit that he adheres to the letter of Henry James' beloved dictum to be "someone on whom nothing is lost."

Part mystery, part war story, part romance, The Winter Soldier is a dream of a novelimpeccably researched and totally immersive. The unsinkable Margarete is a mesmerizing character, and the book's investigation into the psychiatric toll of war on its combatants could not be more timely. This novel convinces you with every sentence.

The Winter Soldier is a haunting and engrossing novel, the kind you clear your schedule to finish reading. This is some of the best writing on WWI since Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy.

In the tradition of Cold Mountain and Doctor Zhivago, Daniel Mason's new novel is a gloriously gripping story of love, war, and the marvel of human endurance. Sweeping yet intimate, brutal yet tender, it kept me up, it broke my heart, and it made me remember yet again just how a good booka really good bookrekindles our love of life.

So real, so rich and detailed, that the room in which I was reading vanished. I was transported to a lost world of the past. Suspenseful, thrilling, aching with emotion. Living with Lucius nd Margarete, it was First World War as I have never felt it.

What I've found most remarkable about Mason's fiction is the quality of his revelations, his ability to unveil temperaments, habits, natures. His stories are mysteries, albeit not in the genre sense...an explanation or solution to the puzzle of a person doesn't punctually arrive. The unknown remains unknown; the unexplainable remains unexplained. There is, instead, an intense quality of revelation a mystical intensity of the sort described by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: 'There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.'

When an artfully written historical novel comes along . it comes as a welcome relief. You can let down your guard and simply enjoy this unfashionable genre in the hands of a master writer. That's how I felt from the very first pages...a captivating story...among the many marvels [of the book]. [The Winter Soldier] does what all the best novels do: Creates a world in which readers pleasurably lose themselves.

The story that unfolds in this forsaken place is so captivating that you may feel...unable to leave it .[Margarete] is Mason's most irresistible creation actresses all over Hollywood should be jockeying to play her part in the inevitable movie adaptation."The Winter Soldier" draws us into the deadly undertow of history that swept away so many in the early 20th century. The redemption the story ultimately offers is equally unlikely and gorgeous, painfully limited but gratefully received in a world thrown into chaos.

UK: Macmillan ; France: Lattes ; Poland: Rebis

I have been a Daniel Mason fan since the Piano Tuner. His abilities as a storyteller and a writer of the most gorgeous prose leave you wanting more. The Winter Soldier is a tour de force. I was immersed in the grandeur of Imperial Vienna and the frozen battlefields of the Eastern Front, and in this beautiful tale of love and war, and of our frailty and resilience in the face of both.

With a physician's precision and an artist's eye, author Daniel Mason captures the emotional and physical upheaval wrought by war...With striking prose and an unencumbered pace, THE WINTER SOLDIER makes for a uniquely compelling read.

Excellent...brims with improbable narrative pleasures...timeless. These pages crackle with excitement ... is a spectacular success.

In The Winter Soldier, Mason achieves a deeply affecting balancing act, drawing us into the crushing agony of war while simultaneously stirring our hearts with an inspired and touching love story.

It's been forever since I was so taken with a novel, so eager to get back to it after a hiatus. A marvelous story that echoes Doctor Zhivago and The English Patient but of course it is its very own story, beautifully imagined and executed. I think we have a future best seller on our hands.

Moving...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.

Mason's lyrical and affecting novel about the costs of war and lost love will satisfy readers of quality fiction.

The Winter Soldier is a deceptively simple story that gets under your skin, so that you find yourself drifting to the people and places days and weeks after finishing the book. An unusual love story set on the Eastern Front of WWI, it highlights the Austrian experience in a way that felt fresh to me, while weaving in questions about the roles of medicine and psychiatry in warfare and the complexity of the oath to "do no harm" in a combat environment.