Flanders
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Flanders is the breakout novel by Patricia Anthony, whose award-winning science fiction has transcended the genre through the sheer power of her storytelling. Anthony’s first true mainstream novel, it is a powerful evocation of the First World War—and the passage between life and death that reveals itself to one young soldier.
World War I, Flanders, Northern France
The British trenches grow wet and foul. For Travis Lee Stanhope, a Texan sharpshooter serving in an English unit, the war is not hell, but home. Each night he ventures into No Man’s Land between his comrades and the German trenches, and waits. At dawn, he begins his methodical sniping of enemy troops. Then he returns. His confirmed kill list is exemplary.
But Travis Lee is changing. His senses are ravaged by the unending scream of shells overhead. His mind is numbed by too many rations of rum. His soul is bled dry by the constant death all around him.
And yet, in his dreams, something still lives. He sees a world like the war, yet unlike, where the living are the same as the walking dead. The people there are his comrades killed in action. Sometimes they are stranded with him on the battlefield. Sometimes they lie in glass-covered graves in an Eden-like cemetery. He tries to ease their pain. But no one can ease his pain. And it will take more than death, and more than dreams, to make Travis Lee realize that he may have a function in this war beyond killing his enemies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Flanders Fields, where so many died so horribly during WWI, an American volunteer named Travis Lee Stanhope finds terror, death, forgiveness and, ultimately, an odd sort of salvation. Anthony (God's Fires), one of speculative fiction's brightest talents, has written a novel of the Great War that is worthy of comparison to Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Travis Lee is a wonderfully complex character, a wild boy from Texas who had the brains to win a scholarship to Harvard, a survivor of childhood abuse who hates his alcoholic father but fears he may be turning into him. Uncomfortable at home and at school, Travis, like many young Americans in 1916, enlists in the British army in search of adventure. What he finds instead is the monstrous human meatgrinder that is Flanders in northern France. Few writers have succeeded so well as Anthony in describing the horrors of trench warfare, the mud and disease, the rotting bodies and unending bombardment, the virtually universal madness that turns men into killers and rapists. Travis Lee is a talented sharpshooter, but as months of terror go by and the number of his kills grows, he beings to see things, at first in his dreams and later on the battlefield itself. Ghosts begin to haunt him, unwilling or unable to leave the shell craters and barbed wire where their lives ended. Told by a battlefield chaplain that he's gifted with the Second Sight, Travis Lee repeatedly finds himself wandering in an unearthly cemetery, a melancholy place that nonetheless hints at the possibility of eternal life. This is a harrowing and beautiful novel, demonstrating--again--that Anthony is one of our finest writers, in and out of the genre.
