by Daniel Mason
First published 2018
Lucius leaves his medical studies in Vienna when World War I begins. The twenty-two-year-old dreams of performing heroic battlefield surgery at an organized military hospital. Instead, he arrives at a makeshift medical station housed in a commandeered church high in the Carpathian Mountains. Typhus has driven away the other doctors. Only Sister Margarete, a mysterious nurse, remains at the freezing outpost. Lucius has never held a scalpel, yet he must learn brutal wartime medicine from this woman he begins to love. When soldiers carry in an unconscious man from the snow, his uniform contains strange drawings. The patient appears beyond saving until Lucius makes a choice that will transform all their lives. The story moves from Vienna's elegant ballrooms to the Eastern Front's frozen battlefields, where Cossack cavalry charges across the landscape. Mason explores how war reshapes medicine, family, and love amid history's chaos.
Genres: historical-fiction, medical, 20th-century, war, military-fiction
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, found-family
Setting: Vienna, Carpathian Mountains, Eastern Front
Period: World War I
352 pages · Hardcover · Mantle
Content warnings: medical-trauma, war