From the USA Today bestselling author of The Long Flight Home, a WWI novel both tender and exciting, as a German Red Cross nurse joins the world's first guide dog training school for the blind and begins a quest to show a Jewish pianist who was blinded on the battlefield that life is worth living...
By April 1916, the fervor that accompanied war’s outbreak has faded. In
its place is a grim reality. Throughout Germany, essentials are
rationed. Hope, too, is in short supply. Anna Zeller, whose fiancé,
Bruno, is fighting on the western front, works as a nurse at an
overcrowded hospital in Oldenburg, trying to comfort men broken in body
and spirit. But during a visit from Dr. Stalling, the director of the
Red Cross Ambulance Dogs Association, she witnesses a rare spark of
optimism: as a German shepherd guides a battle-blinded soldier over a
garden path, Dr. Stalling is inspired with an idea—to train dogs as
companions for sightless veterans.
Anna convinces Dr. Stalling
to let her work at his new guide dog training school. Some of the dogs
that arrive are themselves veterans of war, including Nia, a German
shepherd with trench-damaged paws. Anna brings the ailing Nia home and
secretly tends and trains her, convinced she may yet be the perfect
guide for the right soldier. In Max Benesch, a Jewish soldier blinded by
chlorine gas at the front, Nia finds her person.
War has
taken Max’s sight, his fiancée, and his hopes of being a composer. Yet
despite all he’s given for his country, the tide of anti-Semitism at
home is rising, and Max encounters it first-hand in one of the school’s
trainers, who is determined to make Max fail. Still, through Anna’s
prompting, he rediscovers his passion for music. But as Anna discovers
more about the conflict’s escalating brutality—and Bruno’s role in
it—she realizes how impossible it will be for any of them to escape the
war unscathed.
Alan Hlad
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