The Winter Soldier

By: Daniel Mason

Narrated by: Laurence Dobiesz

Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award

From the bestselling author of The Piano Tuner, comes Daniel Mason's The Winter Soldier, a story of love and medicine through the devastation of the First World War.

Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War One 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.

'Part mystery, part war story, part romance, The Winter Soldier is a dream of a novel' - Anthony Doerr, author of All The Light We Cannot See.

Critic reviews

Part mystery, part war story, part romance, The Winter Soldier is a dream of a novel — impeccably researched and totally immersive (Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See)

One of the finest prose stylists in American fiction

Utterly convincing and written with a lyricism that belies the horrors it so unflinchingly describes

Held me by the throat from the first lyrical page to the last (Emma Donoghue)

A powerful tale

A tour-de-force. I was immersed in the grandeur of Imperial Vienna and the frozen battlefields of the Eastern Front (Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone)

So real, so rich and detailed, that the room in which I was reading vanished (Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less and The Story of a Marriage)

One of the best books I've ever read (Elizabeth MacNeal, author of The Doll Factory)

Captivating . . . A novel to get lost in

A powerful tale of a medical student in the First World War

A touching, intensely human story of longing and love (Georgia Hunter, author of We Were The Lucky Ones)