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The Verdun affair

Dybek, Nick2018
Books
In 1920, two young Americans meet in Verdun, the city in France where one of the most devastating battles of the war was waged. Tom is an orphan from Chicago, a former ambulance driver now gathering bones from the battlefield; Sarah is an expatriate from Boston searching for the husband who wandered off from his division and hasn't been seen since. Quickly, the two fall into a complicated affair against the ghostly backdrop of the ruined city. Months later, Sarah and Tom meet again at the psychiatric ward of an Italian hospital, drawn there by the appearance of a mysterious patient the doctors call Douglas Fairbanks (after the silent film actor) - a shell-shocked soldier with no memory of who he is. At the hospital, Tom and Sarah are joined by Paul, an Austrian journalist with his own interest in the amnesiac. Each is keeping a secret; each has been shaken by the horrors of war. Decades later, Tom, now a successful screenwriter, encounters Paul by chance in LA, still grappling with the questions raised by this gorgeous and incisive novel: How to begin again after unfathomable trauma? How to love after so much loss? And who, in the end, was Douglas Fairbanks?
Main title:
The Verdun affair / Nick Dybek.
Author:
Dybek, Nick, author
Imprint:
London : Corsair, an imprint of Little Brown Book Group, 2018.©2018.
Collation:
294 pages ; 24 cm
Notes:
First published in the US by Scribner in 2018.
ISBN:
9781472153852 (paperback)
Dewey class:
813.6
Language:
English
BRN:
336682
LocationCollectionCall numberStatus/Desc
Brighton LibraryAdult Fiction - GeneralDYBEAvailable
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