Peace

A stunning short novel with breakout potential to exhilerate readers who loved Ian McEwan's Atonement; The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert; and Sandor Marais' Embers.

Italy, near Cassino. The terrible winter of 1944. A dismal icy rain falls, unabated, for days.

Three American soldiers set out on the gruelling ascent of a perilous Italian mountainside in the murky closing days of the Second World War. Haunted by their sergeant's cold-blooded murder of a young girl, and with only an old man of uncertain loyalties as their guide, they trudge on in a state of barely suppressed terror and confusion. With snipers lying in wait for them, the men are confronted by agonising moral choices... Taut and propulsive - Peace is a feat of economy, compression, and imagination, a tough and unmistakably contemporary meditation on the corrosiveness of violence, the human cost of war, and the redemptive power of mercy.

Richard Bausch is the author of a number of novels and short stories. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Playboy, GQ, Harper's Magazine, and other publications and has been featured in numerous best-of collections. He is chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and lives in Memphis, Tennessee, where he is Moss Chair of Excellence in the Writer's Workshop of the University of Memphis.