THE WARM HANDS OF GHOSTS

Set on and off the battlefields of Belgium in the final year of World War I, this novel adds a supernatural touch to its vividly realized historical details.

Arden moves on from her fantasies set in medieval Russia—The Bear and the Nightingale (2017) is the first in the trilogy—to a more realistic and often grueling depiction of the horrors of war. In January 1918, 24-year-old combat nurse Laura Iven has been sent home from Flanders to Halifax, Nova Scotia, after receiving serious wounds. When she’s notified that her younger brother, Freddie, who’s serving in Belgium, is missing and presumed dead, she becomes convinced he’s still alive and heads off to search for him. In an alternating timeline that begins several months earlier on the front lines, Freddie finds himself buried underground in a concrete German pillbox, his only companion the wounded German soldier Hans Winter. The two form a strong bond and eventually dig their way out, only to be confronted by more mud, blood, and death. Freddie, ashamed of his feelings for Winter and what he sees as his betrayal of his country, takes what seems like refuge with the mysterious fiddler Faland, who shows the guests at his glimmering hotel a mirror that reveals their hearts’ desires and then steals their memories to make his music. As the novel proceeds, the two storylines merge, with Laura attempting to save Freddie before it’s too late. Arden titles her chapters with quotations from Paradise Lost and the biblical Book of Revelation, and appropriately so: The landscape, both physical and spiritual, that the characters navigate is hellish, and for better or worse, their old world is being transformed into a new one. Unabashedly grim though laced with faint hints of hope, the novel immerses the reader in a war often overshadowed by the one that would follow a couple of decades later.

A surprisingly successful merger of history and fantasy.