The Warm Hands of Ghosts, by Katherine Arden

It’s been just over 100 years since the end of World War I. The last veterans have passed away and World War II has largely eclipsed what was called the Great War in a lot of Western minds. Katherine Arden’s heartbreaking historical fantasy, The Warm Hands of Ghosts, brings the horrors of the catastrophic First World War back to life through the eyes of a nurse and her soldier brother. Both characters search for each other in the wake of the Battle of Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres, July-November 1917) through figurative and literal hell.

Laura Iven was sent home to Canada after the Belgian hospital she was working at was shelled by the Germans in the fall of 1917 and she received a near-fatal leg wound. Tragically, almost as soon as she recovers (mostly) and finds new work, her parents are killed in the Halifax Explosion. She only has one relative left, her brother Freddie, who disappeared during the Battle of Passchendaele. After what Laura has seen of the front, it’s hard to hold out hope that Freddie is still alive. She’s a cynical person but, when a package arrives with Freddie’s bloody infantry jacket and both halves of his ID tag, Laura pulls strings to be sent back to Belgium to search for him. (ID tags were split in half when a body was recovered. One half was sent to family members after the death was recorded; the other half would stay with the remains.)

Our first hints that The Warm Hands of Ghosts is not a straight work of historical fiction come from the three elderly women whom Laura boards with and nurses for. The three women run seances (Laura dismisses them as scam artists) that are surprisingly accurate. Readers who remember their Greek myths will clock the familiar-sounding names of the three Parkey sisters. Things get even stranger when Laura returns to Belgium and starts to hear rumors of a fiddler who offers respite from the bombs, the wet, and the deprivations of trench warfare, only to disappear by morning and never be seen again. It would be easy for Laura to dismiss her own strange encounter with the fiddler, Faland, except that the women traveling with her also have the same experience. It’s harder to explain away something as a hallucination or a dream if others remember it, too.

Freddie’s story is told in parallel with Laura’s. We know he’s alive after surviving the explosion of a German pillbox emplacement but his story is even stranger than Laura’s. It’s a miracle that Freddie wasn’t killed by the explosion or by being buried in mud. Thanks to the presence of a German soldier named Winter who was in the pillbox, Freddie managed to dig them out. Once the two men emerge, however, they have a new problem. If they find the German trenches, Freddie will be taken prisoner and possibly shot. If they find the Allies’ trenches, Winter will be the one facing imprisonment and possible execution. There is no safety for either of them…until they run across a curious fiddle player who offers them refuge for a negligible price.

As The Warm Hands of Ghosts developed, I felt so much sympathy for Laura and Freddie. Both of them have almost died. They’ve suffered terribly at the disastrous whims of the generals who’ve sent so many people to their deaths over the course of the war. The easy thing would be to either go home and forget (Laura) or retreat into fantasy and oblivion (Freddie). The hard thing is to keep putting one foot in front of the other and search for a way through trauma and death. But what I love most about this incredible novel is that neither Laura or Freddie has to do the hard thing alone. There are hands—from friends and from ghosts—to pull them through their trials to the other side, whatever that might look like.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a beautiful and harrowing novel. I strongly recommend it to fans of historical fantasy or readers who are looking for a more original war story.