2nd September 2010

Catalogue > Search Results

Peace

Richard Bausch

‘Richard Bausch’s Peace, set at the end of the Second World War in Italy, is a small masterpiece with the same emotional force and moral complexity as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.’ Colm Tóibín

Peace is a strikingly powerful short novel about war, trust and salvation that begs to be read in a single sitting. The first book to be published in Atlantic Books’ new Tusker Rock imprint, edited by Colm Tóibín and Peter Straus, promises to be a publishing event.

Italy, near Cassino. The terrible winter of 1944. Dismal icy rain falls, unabated, for days.

Three American soldiers set out on the gruelling ascent of a perilous Italian mountainside in the murky closing days of World War II. Haunted by the cold-blooded murder of a young girl by their sergeant, and with only a seventy-year-old Italian man of dubious loyalties as their guide, they trudge on in an atmosphere of barely suppressed terror and confusion. With snipers lying in wait for them, and their survival imperative, the men are confronted with agonizing moral choices.
Taut and propulsive – with its spare language, punishing landscape, and the keenly drawn portraits of three young soldiers at is core – Peace is a feat of economy, compression and imagination, a brutal and unmistakably contemporary meditation on the corrosiveness of violence, the human cost of war, and the redemptive power of mercy.

Buy from Amazon.co.uk