Winterman's Letter

In the final months of the First World War, a young woman begins to search for two British soldiers missing in battle. Harrowed by lack of any confirmation of their fate, she must discover it for herself; they are her lovers. Yet even as her quest yields clues, there is something she cannot know: one of them wrote a letter that was never sent, a letter meant for her but taken by the advancing German Army. Its pages contain a bitter secret as well as answers to questions at the centre of her torment: Can there be any hope? Should she hold on? Should she wait for their return?

Knowing only worry, anguish and wretched distress, the stricken woman digs for the truth, unearthing details of the carnage that has enveloped her men at the front, a gradually increasing knowledge that forces her to glimpse the brutal realities of the fighting across the Channel.

Winterman’s Letter, standalone sequel to A Salient in Flanders, is a novel to thrust the reader as mercilessly into the furnace of war as it does into the troubled psyches of its characters: gravely wounded soldiers shipped home to heal, their bodies broken and some of them blind; also those still in battle on both sides. One of these is a German officer who now carries the letter, its pages holding the answer to the young woman’s quest. He is determined to deliver it, his personal debt of honour to a worthy enemy …