The Warm Hands of Ghosts

September 1, 2023

Author of the gorgeous "Winternight" series, a personal favorite, the New York Times best-selling Arden pens the story of a World War I field nurse suspicious of news about her brother's battlefield death and soon following rumors of haunted trenches and a mysterious figure granting oblivion amid The Warm Hands of Ghost. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2023

Laura nursed soldiers during the Great War until an injury sent her home to Halifax, where the war followed her in a harbor explosion that killed her parents. Her brother Freddie is all she has left, so when Laura receives suspicious news of his death, she returns to the front line to find the truth. Freddie dug his way out of a shelled bunker alongside a German soldier. Unwilling to return to being enemies, they flee the trenches and encounter a fiddler who offers a magical escape from the war, for a price. Arden's World War I setting is visceral, with real-world horrors that make warm-handed ghosts and seductive devils comforting in comparison. The touch of fantasy enhances the uncanny, shifting realities of a world in turmoil as Laura's search for her brother brings her closer to the fiddler and a choice between man-made despair and supernatural oblivion. The wartime bonds Laura and Freddie forge ground the story and leave readers hoping for them to find an escape that doesn't cost their souls. VERDICT Like the fiddler himself, Arden's (The Winter of the Witch) gripping historical fantasy will draw readers in and keep them engaged.--Erin Niederberger

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 11, 2023
Arden (The Bear and the Nightingale) blends a meticulously researched WWI epic, an eloquent family saga, and a touch of the supernatural in this breathtaking historical fantasy. Nurse Laura Iven returns home to Halifax, Nova Scotia, after being wounded on the Western Front and honorably discharged from the medical corps. When she learns in early 1918 that her soldier brother Freddie—her last living family member—is missing and presumed dead, she’s overwhelmed with questions, so she volunteers to return to Belgium, where she’ll work at a private hospital and seek answers in her limited spare time. The narrative shifts between Laura’s perspective and Freddie’s own, a year prior, as he falls in with a mysterious and potentially mystical new friend, adding captivating depth and tension to an already intriguing premise. Arden’s carefully constructed plot makes each unexpected twist feel as inevitable as it is shocking. Through resonant prose, she literalizes the apocalyptic qualities of WWI while dwelling in moral complexity and delivering vibrant, fully fleshed-out characters. The interwoven supernatural elements lend the historical details greater weight. The result is a powerful page-turner. Agent: Paul Lucas, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

January 1, 2024
Laura's been discharged from her position as an army-hospital nurse in Belgium in 1918, but an eerie message during a s�ance and a puzzling box of her brother's belongings send her back to the front to find answers. With swirling atmosphere and supernatural elements emerging organically alongside the facts of history, Arden (The Bear and the Nightingale, 2017) thoughtfully weaves together the brutality of war and the tightrope walk between hope and despair. Ghosts are on the mind of just about every soldier in Laura's hospital, but there's one man in particular they keep talking about: Faland, whom soldiers obsessively seek out, and who just might know what happened to Laura's brother. Tension builds as chapters alternate between Laura and her brother's perspectives and the truth becomes ever more sinister. Arden excels at sumptuous, immersive world building, and the muddy, foggy, war-ravaged landscape comes vividly to life in her hands, especially the otherworldly places that seem to flit in and out of sight. Fans of historical fiction and earthy ghost stories will appreciate this arresting tale.

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Starred review from January 1, 2024
Set on and off the battlefields of Belgium in the final year of World War I, this novel adds a supernatural touch to its vividly realized historical details. Arden moves on from her fantasies set in medieval Russia--The Bear and the Nightingale (2017) is the first in the trilogy--to a more realistic and often grueling depiction of the horrors of war. In January 1918, 24-year-old combat nurse Laura Iven has been sent home from Flanders to Halifax, Nova Scotia, after receiving serious wounds. When she's notified that her younger brother, Freddie, who's serving in Belgium, is missing and presumed dead, she becomes convinced he's still alive and heads off to search for him. In an alternating timeline that begins several months earlier on the front lines, Freddie finds himself buried underground in a concrete German pillbox, his only companion the wounded German soldier Hans Winter. The two form a strong bond and eventually dig their way out, only to be confronted by more mud, blood, and death. Freddie, ashamed of his feelings for Winter and what he sees as his betrayal of his country, takes what seems like refuge with the mysterious fiddler Faland, who shows the guests at his glimmering hotel a mirror that reveals their hearts' desires and then steals their memories to make his music. As the novel proceeds, the two storylines merge, with Laura attempting to save Freddie before it's too late. Arden titles her chapters with quotations from Paradise Lost and the biblical Book of Revelation, and appropriately so: The landscape, both physical and spiritual, that the characters navigate is hellish, and for better or worse, their old world is being transformed into a new one. Unabashedly grim though laced with faint hints of hope, the novel immerses the reader in a war often overshadowed by the one that would follow a couple of decades later. A surprisingly successful merger of history and fantasy.

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