Title: The Warm Hands of Ghosts
Author: Katherine Arden
Publisher: Del Rey
Publication date: February 13, 2024
Length: 336 pages
Genre: Historical fiction
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley
Rating:
During the Great War, a combat nurse searches for her brother, believed dead in the trenches despite eerie signs that suggest otherwise, in this hauntingly beautiful historical novel with a speculative twist from the New York Times bestselling author of The Bear and the Nightingale
January 1918. Laura Iven was a revered field nurse until she was wounded and discharged from the medical corps, leaving behind a brother still fighting in Flanders. Now home in Halifax, Canada, she receives word of Freddie’s death in combat, along with his personal effects—but something doesn’t make sense. Determined to uncover the truth, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital. Soon after arriving, she hears whispers about haunted trenches, and a strange hotelier whose wine gives soldiers the gift of oblivion. Could Freddie have escaped the battlefield, only to fall prey to something—or someone—else?
November 1917. Freddie Iven awakens after an explosion to find himself trapped in an overturned pillbox with a wounded enemy soldier, a German by the name of Hans Winter. Against all odds, the two men form an alliance and succeed in clawing their way out. Unable to bear the thought of returning to the killing fields, especially on opposite sides, they take refuge with a mysterious man who seems to have the power to make the hellscape of the trenches disappear.
As shells rain down on Flanders, and ghosts move among those yet living, Laura’s and Freddie’s deepest traumas are reawakened. Now they must decide whether their world is worth salvaging—or better left behind entirely.
After reading and loving Katherine Arden’s Winternight trilogy, I expected great things from her new novel, The Warm Hands of Ghosts. Those expectations were met, and then some.
In The Warm Hands of Ghosts, we’re plunged into the nightmare of war through the experiences of Laura Iven, a Canadian battlefield nurse, and her brother Freddie, a soldier on the frontlines in Belgium. As the novel weaves their stories together, we’re given an up-close look at the horrors of World War I.
As the book opens, Laura is back home in Halifax in early 1918, having been discharged from the army after suffering serious injury when her hospital in Belgium was bombed. But life in Halifax is not peaceful either; shortly before the book opens, the ship explosion of 1917 (a devastating historical event — read more here) kills thousands in the city, including Laura and Freddie’s parents.
When Laura receives a package containing her brother’s bloody uniform and his ID tags, she’s thrust into even more severe grief, but feels that something’s not right. No one she writes to can tell her about his final days or provide information about what might have happened to him. When she meets a woman heading back to Belgium to organize a hospital, Laura volunteers to go along, desperate to learn more about Freddie’s fate.
Meanwhile, through alternating chapters, we learn that Freddie did survive… barely. After being trapped in a collapsed pillbox on the battlefield, he and a German soldier, Hans Winter, save one another and navigate through the hellscape of the battlefield back to the relative safety of the Allied hospital. But saving Winter makes Freddie a traitor, and he finds shelter with a strange, eerie man whose violin-playing and eerie, ornate hotel promise oblivion and escape from the war.
Soldiers exchange stories of someone called “the fiddler”, whose music both captivates and repels, and who is rumored to steal men’s souls in exchange for relief from their worst nightmares. Freddie falls under the spell of the fiddler, but as he loses bits of himself, he doesn’t find the peace he seeks. Meanwhile, Laura refuses to give up on finding the truth about her lost brother, and the siblings endure greater and greater dangers in their quest to discover one anothers’ fates.
The Warm Hands of Ghosts incorporates an other-worldly element as it examines the toll of war and horror on people’s inner selves. We see wounded and shell-shocked soldiers, people maimed or whose minds have been destroyed. Is it any wonder that they embrace the idea of a supernatural presence that feeds off souls and promises ease? As Laura ponders:
Was remembered agony better than feeling nothing at all?
That’s the crux of the dilemma facing the characters who encounter the fiddler. Life amidst the hell of war promises pain and suffering, and even out of the warzone, as Laura experienced back in Halifax, there’s no escape from the torment of memories. The characters, again and again, face this impossible decision: Give in and forget, or hold on and suffer?
They all drank. The wine was glorious. Like getting hit in the face by an ocean wave; it was a shock, then a pleasure, then a numbness.
There’s so much more to the story, of course. Underneath the horror of it all, there are strong threads of love running throughout the lives of the characters we come to know. The bonds between Laura and Freddie, Freddie and Winter, and Laura and the women she befriends are all strong, forged in a shared experience that those who haven’t been to war will never be able to fully comprehend.
Laura is a marvelous characters. As a nurse, she’s extremely brave, competent, and compassionate. She’s also damaged, both physically and emotionally, and makes decisions following her heart, even when logic would dictate otherwise. Freddie is fascinating as well — wounded to his core, suffering in his psyche from the horrors he’s both seen and inflicted, and unable to envision any sort of future for himself.
The battlefield scenes are vivid and terrible and utterly visceral. The terror and butchery are shown plainly, and the psychological toll is clear and awful to read about.
Despite the disturbing nature of reading about World War I battlefield experiences, I was struck over and over again by how beautiful Katherine Arden’s writing is. Little phrases and moments would catch my attention from time to time, just because I so admired the words and sentences.
London felt like limbo to her, the glittering center of the modern world become merely the war’s antechamber.
I would imagine that the supernatural element might not work for every reader, particularly for those who pick up The Warm Hands of Ghosts looking for a more traditional historical fiction reading experience. (Then again, the title does have the word ghosts in it, so it’s not like the supernatural piece is hidden in any way.) For me, I found The Warm Hands of Ghosts a powerful, sad, evocative book, and it’s fully deserving of a 5-star rating. Highly recommended.
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