by Richard Bausch
From the prize-winning novelist and world-renowned short story writer, recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Academy Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, a powerful novel about war, trust, and salvation that begs to be read in a single sitting.
Italy, near Cassino. The terrible winter of 1944. A dismal icy rain, continuing unabated for days. Guided by a seventy-year-old Italian man in rope-soled shoes, three American soldiers are sent on a reconnaissance mission up the side of a steep hill that they discover, before very long, to be a mountain. And the old mans indeterminate loyalties only add to the terror and confusion that engulf them on that mountain, where they are confronted with the horror of their own timeand then set upon by a sniper.
Taut and propulsivewith its spare language, its punishing landscape, and the keenly drawn portraits of the three young soldiers at its centerPeace is a feat of economy, compression, and imagination, a brutal and unmistakably contemporary meditation on the corrosiveness of violence, the human cost of war, and the redemptive power of mercy.
"Starred Review. Bausch's compassion for Marson and his men is evident, but his story is unforgiving; the tightly paced final scenes offer no clarity of purpose in a dark war story of unyielding sorrow." - Publishers Weekly.
"Starred Review. Bausch admirably turns a familiar story into something genuinely new." - Kirkus Reviews.
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This is Richard Bauschs eleventh novel. He is also the author of seven volumes of short stories.
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