- Published 2024
- 403 pages
- Format: digital (ARC)
- Genres: historical, fantasy
I loved everything about this book, from the detailed history and setting (World War I Belgium and Halifax, Canada) to its beautiful but haunting story. It was the perfect blend of historical fiction and fantasy. I was already a big fan of Katherine Arden’s Winternight trilogy, but this book is very different from her other ones, and apparently it’s a book that took her a long time to write. It’s worth the wait.
In 1918, Laura is a war nurse who’s been discharged with a leg injury. She arrives home to Halifax when a ship (the SS Mont-Blanc) explodes in the harbor. The ship was full of high explosives and the explosion killed nearly 1,800 people, and blowing out a large sector of buildings in Halifax. Laura loses both of her parents in the tragedy. Then, weeks later, she receives a box with the uniform and dog tags of her brother Freddie, but no explanation of what happened to him. Not knowing if he’s dead or alive, she returns to the front, determined to find out.
We get both Freddie’s and Laura’s perspectives in this story, only Freddie’s story begins a few months earlier, in the Battle of Passchendaele. As their stories converge, both Freddie and Laura hear about a mysterious man known as “the fiddler”. The soldiers say that once you’ve entered his bar, drank his liquor and heard his music, you’ll never want to leave, and you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to get back. Of course, amidst the horrors of war, this is only one more strange story going around, and it seems pretty understandable that the soldiers would want to be anywhere other than where they are.
Laura and Freddie are great characters, as are the friends they make in their journeys. Laura is so strong and determined, but she’s also haunted by the memory of her mother’s death, who was alone in their house in Halifax’s harbor. She also struggles with her physical injuries from the war, including scarred hands from nerve gas. Freddie is haunted by the things he’s done in the war. As Arden tells the story, it seems like basic right and wrong gets turned around in war, where you’re forced to kill innocent people, betray friends, and fleeing means you’ll get shot by a firing squad.
I won’t tell you more about the story. I loved the vivid, atmospheric writing and the way the fantastic elements just blended seamlessly with the history (war is already such a strange, unimaginable environment). It reminded me at times of the first Wonder Woman movie, the way it was horrific and beautiful at the same time. I also loved the way Arden slowly builds the relationships that Freddie and Laura develop over the course of the story.
The book is named for a World War I memoir, Ghosts Have Warm Hands, by Will R. Bird, a soldier in Canada’s Black Watch from 1916-1919. In this memoir Bird describes several experiences where he was guided to safety by the ghost of his brother, who died early in the war.
I want to share what Arden says about this book on Goodreads:
Ghosts is a book about love and loss, how the world ends, and how it goes on. It’s about the nature of evil and the shape of hell, and about war. I started it in 2019, and here it is coming out in 2024, when young men are fighting in trenches in Europe once again. Perhaps enjoy is the wrong word for the book I spent a long time calling the Fiend. But I hope it haunts you, as it has haunted me.
Katherine Arden
Note: I received an advanced review copy from NetGalley and publisher Del Rey. This book published February 13, 2024.
