Two by Mingarelli

Two timeless novellas about men in combat, from the Prix Médicis award winner whom Ian McEwan calls “remarkable,” combined in one anniversary volume for the first time

From the late, award-winning author Hubert Mingarelli, two of his most powerful novellas, now collected in one volume, plunge readers into the brutal, frozen landscapes of war and the moral chasms it creates. This masterful collection, including a tenth-anniversary edition of A Meal in Winter and a twentieth-anniversary edition of Four Soldiers, explores the quiet moments of suffering, conscience, and fragile humanity that unfold amidst the overwhelming violence of history.

In the Prix Médicis award–winning Four Soldiers, a small unit in the Red Army in WWI waits out a brutal winter near the Romanian front. Amid the mundane struggle for food and warmth, they talk, smoke, and wait—for spring, for orders, for the inevitable return of violence, revealing the profound bonds and anxieties that define a soldier’s life between battles. The novella was also longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.

In A Meal in Winter, short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and selected by Indies Introduce in the United States, three German soldiers in Poland during WWII are tasked with capturing a Jewish fugitive. What begins as a simple order descends into a tense moral reckoning when a break from the cold in an abandoned house forces each man to confront his own conscience and the humanity of his prisoner.

Mingarelli’s sparse, evocative prose captures the chilling atmosphere of war and the complex inner lives of men pushed to their limits. Two by Mingarelli is a profound and unforgettable exploration of survival, morality, and the search for warmth in the coldest of times.