The German Ward
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
The love story of the year: a breathtaking new novel from the author of global bestsellers The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder of Jericho. A tale of love between enemies behind the lines of WW1 and the Australian artist who captures their secret.
This is a story about desire.
France, 1915. An English nurse and German doctor fall in love. He is a prisoner of war; she has never cared for rules. Their love is visceral and urgent, forbidden and doomed, and it would have gone unrecorded if not for a series of drawings found more than a century later.
At first the drawings seem insignificant, but the woman who finds them glimpses moments of intimacy and can’t look away. The images become part of a puzzle she wants to solve: who were the lovers, what became of them, and what story of war was the artist trying to tell?
In this luminous tale of hope in the midst of darkness, Pip Williams expands the world of her bestselling novels, The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder of Jericho. Sensual and sophisticated, The German Ward shows one of Australia’s most significant writers reaching the height of her skills.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
While researching The Bookbinder of Jericho, Pip Williams discovered an intriguing drawing by Australian wartime artist Iso Rae. That real-life discovery became the seed for The German Ward—and Rae herself became one of its characters. Set in France in 1915, the novel returns to Tilda Taylor, the outspoken actress and suffragette who appeared in both The Dictionary of Lost Words and Jericho. Now working as a nurse, Tilda falls in love with Hugo, a German doctor being held as a POW, and their forbidden relationship is captured in Rae’s drawings. More than a century later, those images inspire another woman to uncover what happened to the lovers. Williams once again finds rich material in the gaps left by history, exploring the private lives and relationships that might otherwise disappear from the record.
