Daniel Mason - A tél katonája

Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a young medical student when the First World War breaks out in Europe. Rabul is captivated by the beautiful, romantic stories about frontline surgery, so he immediately signs up as a volunteer, expecting to be sent to a well-equipped field hospital. But when he arrives at a church requisitioned for military purposes in a remote, high valley of the Carpathians, he finds a forward position where it is bitterly cold and typhus has been raging before. The other doctors had already fled, and only one mysterious nurse remained: Nurse Margarete. But Lucius had never held a scalpel before. While the war rages in the winter landscape, he falls in love with the woman from whom he must learn brutal medicine dictated by necessity. One day, a strange soldier is brought to them from the snow, whose uniform is covered with strange drawings. Although it seems unsalvageable, in the end Lucius makes a decision that changes the life of the doctor, the patient and the nurse forever. From the gilded ballrooms of imperial Vienna to the icy forest of the Eastern Front, from the hand-assembled operating room to the Cossack cavalry galloping across the battlefield: this book is a story of war, healing, family and found love amidst the storms of history, which shows the mistakes we make, and what precious opportunities there are to make amends for them.