The Winter Soldier, Daniel Mason
The Winter Soldier, Daniel Mason
2 Rating(s)
List: $27.99 | Sale: $19.59
Club: $13.99

The Winter Soldier

Author: Daniel Mason

Narrator: Laurence Dobiesz

Unabridged: 11 hr 35 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/11/2018


Synopsis

The epic story of war and medicine from the award-winning author of The Piano Tuner is "a dream of a novel...part mystery, part war story, part romance" (Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See). 

Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-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, 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.

"The Winter Soldier brims with improbable narrative pleasures...These pages crackle with excitement... A spectacular success." —Anthony Marra, New York Times Book Review

Reviews

Goodreads review by Miranda on December 09, 2020

4.5 starsThere was something quite primitive and horrid about it.Lucius has always (always) wanted to be a doctor. Despite his parents many objections, there was never any doubt in his mindwhat he was going to do. Well, until WWI broke out. Faced with the absolutely terrifying new world, Lucius ta......more

Goodreads review by Canadian Jen on February 11, 2019

This was easily a hands down 5 star and what a phenomenal story. I’m speechless and wowed. And thus begins the life of a physician. Not even completed his training, Lucius is pulled into the war in 1914, romanticizing the opportunity to finally practice on real patients. But the reality wasn’t the me......more

Goodreads review by Angela M on September 30, 2018

4+ stars. Historical fiction is a favorite genre for me, but I have not read a lot of books about WWI. While this is a war story, it doesn’t take place on the battlefield field. The majority of the story takes place at a field hospital in a church in a place called Lemnowice, in the Carpathian Mounta......more

Goodreads review by Susanne on September 23, 2018

4 Stars The year is 1914. Lucius is a young medical student in Vienna, when the war breaks out and he immediately becomes a “War Doctor.” Lucius is sent to Lemnowice in the Carpathian Mountain, where the conditions are barbaric: Amputations, Gonorrhea, Lice and Typhus - to name a few. The “Hospital”......more


Quotes

"The beauty of The Winter Soldier persists even through scenes of unspeakable agony. That tension reflects the span of Daniel Mason's talent. As a writer, he knows how to capture the grace of a moment; as a doctor, he knows how wrong things can go...The Winter Soldier draws us into the deadly undertow of history that swept away so many in the early twentieth century. The redemption the story ultimately offers is equally unlikely and gorgeous, painfully limited but gratefully received in a world thrown into chaos."—Ron Charles, Washington Post

"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 but The Winter Soldier delivers, in shocking detail, a relentless inventory of the era's medical knowledge and practices...The novel's pacing clips along tightly; its closure, when at last it comes, proves deeply, memorably moving...One is reminded of a dozen greats: Doctor Zhivago, The English Patient, For Whom the Bell Tolls."—Joan Frank, San Francisco Chronicle

"Extraordinary."—Isabel Allende, The Guardian

"The Winter Soldier held me by the throat from the first lyrical page to the last. A story which manages to be as original as it is timeless, and above all, credible."—Emma Donoghue, bestselling author of Room

"Timeless...The Winter Soldier brims with improbable narrative pleasures...Within the meticulously researched and magnificently realized backdrop of European dissolution, Mason finds his few lost souls, and shepherds them toward an elusive peace. Lucius's 'dream of being able to see another person's thinking' is not only the controlling metaphor of The Winter Soldier but the work of literature more broadly."—Anthony Marra, New York Times

"Captivating...Early passages describing the hospital, its various characters, and the education that Lucius receives there--both medical and romantic--are among the many marvels of The Winter Soldier...It does what all the best novels do: creates a world in which readers pleasurably lose themselves."—Tom Beer, Newsday

"Part mystery, part war story, part romance, The Winter Soldier is a dream of a novel--impeccably 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."—Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer-prize winning author of All the Light We Cannot See

"This is a great war novel, plunging you into the chaos of conflict and the unexpected consequences of a love that begins amid that chaos."—Lynn Neary, NPR (Best Books of 2018)

"Can it be that this novel is too interesting? Too well constructed? Too filled with humanity, depth, arcane facts, and matters of life and death? Is it just too perfect a book? Everyone I have pushed to read this book says yes. Please judge for yourself if this isn't one of the most satisfying novels you have ever encountered."—Louise Erdrich, author of Future Home of the Living God and the National Book Critics Circle Award winner LaRose

"A uniquely compelling read...With a physician's precision and an artist's eye, author Daniel Mason captures the emotional and physical upheaval wrought by war. Right from the start, the novel thrums with tension, whisking the reader into the fray."—Melissa Brown, Bookpage