I want to read every book this author writes. She's that good. This story centers around the horrors of World War 1. Laura is a Canadian nurse who is discharged from the front as she faithfully served as a nurse before she was injured. But after a tragic accident in her hometown, Laura once again sets off to the Belgium frontlines. This time she is accompanied by Mary Burton, who can help secure her job in a hospital an Pim Shaw, whose son was killed in the war. Laura knows her brother was also killed; however, she begins to question what exactly has happened to him and why is body was never found.

The author again weaves in a bit of myth and folklore. There have always been stories about ghosts, premonitions and odd occurrences on the battlefield whether due to lack of sleep, hunger and the presence of death and destruction. This was a captivating story of soldiers, the women who mourn them, the evils of war and the hope of love. I received an eBook from the publisher via Netgalley.com in exchange for a review

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced ecopy of The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden.

The Bear and the Nightingale trilogy is one of my favorites, so I was very much looking forward to Arden's newest book. While this story of WWI and its traumas was much more heartbreaking and sobering than her folkloric adventures, it was written just as beautifully. Arden knows how to tell a story and weave just the right amount of supernatural elements in. It's a sad and impactful story filled with longing and hope.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts was unlike anything I have ever read. I found the plot to be captivating and the dual POV added depth to the characters and the story itself. I felt that the beginning was a little slow, it took me more than I thought it would to get into it. I did really enjoy the story once I got past the first couple of chapters. I think what captivated me most was that this was a historical fiction novel, and the aspect of magical realism that was thrown in there neatly tied everything together.

Laura is a powerful woman, and the way Katherine Arden wrote her was absolutely beautiful. Arden did a wonderful job of giving depth to all of the characters within the story, and I loved that the romance was woven in as a subtle subplot. Arden did a great job of making Laura a very independent character and giving her the means to live without a man during a time when that wasn't necessarily common. I really appreciated that the romance in the story did not become the entire plot and instead remained a subplot.

Overall The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a book I'd recommend to anyone looking for historical fiction with a magical realism twist. The way the magical realism is portrayed made the book that much better. Instead of taking away from the plot, it added just the right amount of mystery and suspense. I could not get enough of this novel once I really got into it! It transported you into the lives of characters that had lived through so much, but kept going despite it all.

In The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Arden has gifted readers a stunning story about life and love set against the backdrop of World War I. The narrative relays the daily struggles of Laura Iven, a field nurse who has returned home to Halifax, Canada after being wounded by shrapnel, and her little brother Freddie, a young man with an artistic temperament who is serving in the trenches. Although Laura receives word of her brother’s death in a battlefield explosion, she is also confronted with otherworldly messages that let her know he is still alive, and she crosses the Atlantic to find the answers she needs. The chapters alternate between Laura’s search and her brother’s experiences as he is trapped beneath a pillbox with an injured German soldier who becomes his only connection to the world of the living.

Although set in a harsh, real-world environment, Arden’s text is rich with supernatural elements. The trenches and the forbidden zone between the warring armies is haunted by the ghosts of fallen soldiers, and rumors of bands of defectors who live among the rubble abound. Perhaps most interesting is the legend of a fiddler who hosts soldiers in his strange hotel, offering them wine which brings them the peace of oblivion in exchange for their stories. The Iven siblings must confront the costs of living in a world of death, destruction, and pain if they hope to escape from the fiddler with the memory of their own identities.

In addition to being a haunting and beautifully written novel, The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a well-researched depiction of the horrors of World War I. In her author’s note, Arden says “World War I deserves our attention. The hectic, violent years from 1915-1918 set the stage for the rest of the tumultuous twentieth century and laid the groundwork for the modern world.” Arden skillfully captures the reality of trench warfare and its aftermath, likening it to the apocalyptic imagination of the Laura and Freddie’s parents who prepared their children for the end of days. The prose is peppered with poetry from Milton, Dante, and Tennyson, and the close juxtaposition of beauty and horror, death and life, will leave readers spellbound. Throughout it all is an enduring sense of hope and an appreciation for the love that makes human life worth living. I loved every word of this book and highly recommend it!

Thank you to NetGalley for a free copy of the book in exchange for a fair review.

The horrors of war and the yearning for human connection drive two unlikely men together - one Canadian and one German trapped in a foxhole depending on only each other to survive. Meanwhile, back at home Laura receives word that her brother Freddie is missing and presumed dead she goes back to the front to find him. She is a skilled war nurse and has already been wounded but nothing prepares her for the current horror at the front line. She meets a strange violin playing hotelier Faland whose gift of helping others see what they want to see comes at a high price. Laura will do anything to find and help her brother and free others caught up in Faland's allure. Battlefield shock and the extreme violence of a brutal war makes it hard to see the good guys from the bad guys and gives way to ghosts, nightmares and perhaps selling your soul to the devil to find peace. A vivid portrayal of WWI staged beautifully in a hellish setting that reads like a cautionary fairy tale.
My thanks to the publisher for the advance copy.

I sincerely feel this book will one day be considered a modern classic.

It is a story of war, terrible and brutal; of love, kind, searching, enduring; loss and grief, and apocalypses great and small. Sometimes, when the world ends, it's not on a grand world stage. It's personal. What do we do when our worlds end?

It's so hard to know what I can say about this book. This is my first arc (provided by netgalley) and this book won't be out for two months!

I need to tell you all the reasons I love Laura and Pim. How they literally collide into each other after both having lost everything and have to find their paths forward. All the reasons I love Freddie and Winter, reborn together in darkness and how far their paths diverge. The two stories start at different times and when you get to the point where they converge? Magic.

It's like a brutally realistic historical fantasy steampunk-esque reimagining of Orpheus and Eurydice, but like platonic (the romances in this book are perfect though not at all the main plot, just that quiet genuine love that grows when you are with a person. ugh, so good).

I don't think I have to give this back? So I will definitely be re-reading it but I've also put in my pre-order for a physical copy. I need to do some annotating.

Thank you, NetGalley, for the opportunity to pre-read this book and share my opinions on it.

My goodness. Any new titles from Katherine Arden are basically an insta-read for me from now on.

Between the two world wars, it seems WWII gets the most press. As awful and bloody and tragic as that war was, I personally have always felt a little more horrified by WWI. The world was in this transition phase of modernization, so there was a lot of crossover with old war tactics and new ones. It was the first war of its kind, something the world had never seen before. And of course, there was always the thick, mucky, inescapable coldness of the trenches and No Man's Land. I can't imagine being in a situation where I'm knee-deep in muck, surrounded by the bodies of my friends, breathing in poisonous, diseased air, knowing at any moment a bullet or artillery could kill me. And yet, if I leave the trench, death is almost certain. What an absolute nightmare.

Arden's <i>The Warm Hands of Ghosts</i> captures that horror, of course, but also the horror what it was like to be at home during the war, learning to cope with fear and uncertainty and grief. We got to see the grim reality that hospitals could be just as horrifying as battlefields, and that even civilians and those serving off of the frontlines could still be damaged or killed.

But even in the midst of this bleak landscape, we got to see the indomitable Laura, whose hope in finding her brother alive propelled her through the story. The strength she must have had to lose both of her parents, recover from being wounded, and go across the Atlantic to serve once again in war-torn Europe to search for her missing, potentially dead, brother just astounded me. Her vulnerability shows through more and more the deeper into the story we got, and yet she never stopped. I also loved that nurse personality she had - very no-nonsense, suffer-no-fools, but very tender and caring at the same time. She was a fantastic character.

I always appreciate proper pacing and good tension in a story, and this is a shining example of a well-paced story. I never once wanted to put the book down the whole time I was reading it, and that's always going to bump up my estimation for any book. I almost wanted to flip back to the beginning and start the book over again once it ended.

Really can't say enough good things about this title, but that's no surprise since that's been my experience with every one of Arden's books I've had the pleasure of reading so far. Can't wait to see what else she writes!

If you are looking for the same vibe you found reading the Winternight Trilogy by the same author, you will not find it here. That is not to say this was a bad read, I actually enjoyed the historical fiction aspect of this woven with the paranormal and fantastical. The author ensures you are invested in each character and how their small stories fit into the larger theme and plot of the book all the way to the end. Even if you were hoping for the same feel as the authors other work, I still think you should give this a chance.

Arden expertly weaves a tale of tragedy, hope, loss, and love in The Warm Hands of Ghosts. This fabulism take on World War I is unflinching in its portrayal of the horrors of World War I. But when the only magic in this world comes with the price of your soul, the real wonder, and triumph, lies in learning how to live after the world ends.

Perfect for fans of The Night Circus and Divine Rivals, The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a masterpiece.

I really enjoyed Katherine Arden's Bear and the Nightingale series. Her talent for weaving beautiful prose is extraordinary and her talents continue to grow with each story she writes.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts follows siblings Laura and Freddie Iven, a combat nurse and soldier in the Great War. This book was both beautiful and haunting, the characters even more so. I will most definitely be on the lookout for Arden's next book!

Katherine Arden's The Warm Hands of Ghosts is her first adult book since her incredible Winternight trilogy, and so, yes, my expectations were very high despite myself. And so it's with some gratitude that I tell you that Ghosts is wholly its own kind of book, one that's far more melancholy and mournful than the Winternight series ever was, even as it once again blends together historical fiction and supernatural elements into something that only enhances both sides of the equation. It's the story of Laura Iven, an English World War I nurse who returns to the battlefield, scars and all, in an effort to find out what happened to her brother, who may or may not be dead. But even before Laura starts seeing images of her dead mother nudging her along her path (or away from things), there's an unreality to the nightmarish and apocalyptic horrors of the war, only underlined all the more when Laura and her companions arrive in an unusual haven from the war that shouldn't really exist. Beyond that - and beyond the alternating chapters from Laura's brother Freddie's perspective, which find his own fight for survival depicted in stark and harrowing terms - I don't want to get too much into the details, as this is a book of subtle pleasures and quiet reveals, with much implied and left to the imagination to fill in, and that makes the story all the richer and better. But suffice to say that this is, as the title implies, a ghost story...but not in any traditional sense of the word, so much as it's a story about the ghosts of the war, whether they be literal, imagined, or psychological ones - or perhaps all of those at once. It's also a story about what it's like to look down the barrel of the end of the world, and to grapple with how we got to this point and to try to find any way to cope with the damage and scars and hurt left behind. The Warm Hands of Ghosts isn't as epic in scope as the Winternight books, nor is it as horrific as her YA Small Spaces series, but it undeniably is the work of that same author, who tries her best to find a way to dramatize a period in history where everything was changing and nothing would be the same - and finds, somehow, that the supernatural might be the best way of depicting entirely man-made events. It's a lovely, heartbreaking, painful book, and if its more subtle, quiet, and withdrawn than her other work, none of that makes it any less wonderfully crafted and told. Rating: **** ½

I loved Arden's <i>Winternight Trilogy</i> and have really enjoyed her YA books, but I was admittedly a little bummed when I saw that her next book was going to be set during World War I. I'm not a huge fan of books set during wars, especially given the rash of World War II books that are popular right now. However, <i>The Warm Hands of Ghosts</i> is one of my favorite books of the year and might even fall above the <i>Winternight Trilogy</i> for me.

The story is devastating. It covers aspects of World War I that I had no idea about or had only the briefest idea about. Arden hits on the absolute tragedy this war was for those who served and the long-term harm it did. Readers looking for a repeat of characters like Vasilisa won't find them in this book because the characters in this one are wholly their own and fighting their own wars.

I adored this book and cannot wait to see what Arden does next.

Thank you, NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

Thank you NetGalley and the Publisher for the ARC!

The book has potential but it fell so short. Plot was bit of a miss and the characters undeveloped and not so interesting.

I received a copy through NetGalley for review.

Let me preface to say if you are looking for this to be like The Bear and the Nightingale you'll be disappointed. They're completely different, so don't go in expecting the same.

I wouldn't recommend reading if you are bothered by graphic descriptions of battlefield violence, of injuries or medical procedures.

Its set in WWI, in the middle of death, despair, heartache on the battlefields and the trenches.
Laura Iven has been honorably discharged after her field hospital was bombed, it had been set up near a munitions dump and it was thought to be too terrible a target to be hit. Her hands are scarred from years of working in bad conditions to save the lives of soldiers, her leg a web of scarring from shrapnel.
She moved home just in time to disaster to strike in the Harbor, killing the family she has left. Only her brother Wilfred Iven is left of it, and it appears he's gone missing or is presumed dead.

Laura has seen too much, lived through too much, she is haunted by her own ghosts of war. It's altered her, it doesn't feel like she belongs in society, where is a place for a woman like her? Hardened, and stubborn she goes back to find out what happened to her brother. The circumstances of his supposed death don't add up to her.

And she finds rumors of a supernatural character, and a magic hotel that appears. Those that visit often pine for it, some are willing to die to get back to it. Is the battlefield the devil's playground? An ancient gods plaything? A creature of the other world come to collect the worst moments humanity has to offer? Who and what is this violinist?

Wilfred and Laura circle each other in this tale, will she be brave enough to pull her brother back through his memories and hold him in this realm? How much of himself will he give away just to be rid of the worst moments? Losing the things that make him- himself in the process? Will he face his reality?
Laura will have to face her own reality as well, and stay rooted as she goes. And an enemy solider will help her do it. When everyone is a pawn in someone's larger game, and you're caught in the tide of war, did you even have a choice to begin with?

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a historical fiction taking place in WW1, but with magical realism. I didn’t know what to expect from this book, as I have not read any of the author’s previous works. But let me tell you I was blown away. The way the author details the terror and the realities of the war and PTSD was captivating. It is heartbreaking and sad at times, but also focuses on hope and love. It is a very thought provoking book and I could tell the author put a lot of thought and research into it. The book has duel POV with two amazing characters. Both of their stories were interesting to me and I always wanted to get back to the other one to see what would happen. I really enjoyed this book and immediately preordered a copy!

5/5

A haunting and sweeping tale about the power of the bonds we share set against the First World War. A discharged war-worn nurse must face an evil that extends beyond the horrors of the battlefield to a sinister force that may have led her brother and others like him astray. Katherine Arden transports readers to 1918, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, friend and foe, and the traumas we endure and strive to overcome. A book both long-awaited and completely worth the wait, The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a marvelous piece of speculative fiction that faces the atrocities of the war with such grace and humanity. The ghosts here are as paranormal as they are man-made and you may just find yourself allured by a fiddler before the end comes. This book has stayed with me in the months after reading like the best kind of ghost story.

Full review to come at a later date on my blog.

While this book isn't a genre I would normally pick up, I couldn't help but to pick up anything written by Arden. Adding ghosts to a historical fiction narrative was something I was not expecting from her with Arden's last book being more fantasy all together. This book beautifully showcases the power of family and war and how love can transcend all.

I’ve been a fan of Arden’s work since I first read her Winternight Trilogy, which I wrote about here and here. While her previous work has been some of the best fantasy and horror I’ve read, she stretches way beyond those genres here in a book I can only describe as quietly incandescent.

The utter horror of World War I has been documented in so many ways that Arden doesn’t feel obligated to give a history lesson here. Instead, she examines the humanity (and inhumanity) experienced by average people caught up in situations too big and too awful to comprehend without going mad. She beautifully renders the utter heartbreak and the paralyzing fear experienced by soldiers, nurses, and doctors, juxtaposed with love, affection, friendship and the human capacity to just get on with it and worry about details later.

In Winternight, Arden wrote about a place called Midnight and the struggle between Chaos and Order. I recognized some aspects of both those things in some scenes here. The character of Faland reminded me a bit of The Bear – the bringer of chaos, the eater of souls – but the character here was developed in such a way that made me cringe but also want more. The concept that the war was so horrific, that it was murdering the old world and making way for the new, was so carefully balanced with the idea that it was also changing the nature of evil itself is one that has kept me thinking long after finishing the book.

I’m not often completely surprised at twists in a story, but the twist near the end of this one left me entirely nonplussed and drained. Arden’s treatment of relationships – brother & sister, mother and child, friend & enemy – is so intricate and beautiful that some scenes made me cry. That doesn’t often happen.

Despite the chaos and horror, the threads that pull it all together are love and madness. How can humans endure utter madness yet still find their way back to those who love them? How much can one person endure before they give up and what lengths would you go to in order to bring your loved one back from the brink?

This book comes out in early 2024 and I predict it will be on all the “Best of 2024” lists. It is a triumph for Katharine Arden and a gift to us all.

If there’s one thing I can always rely on, it’s Katherine Arden to write something beautiful, evocative and atmospheric no matter the setting or layout of the novel. Even in the horrifying realities of Belgium in the throes of WWI, she somehow was able to take themes around the temptation of oblivion amidst unimaginable horror and turn it into a reflexive study of human perseverance and the lengths we’ll go to to save those we love. I had no doubt I’d love this book, as an ardent fan of the Winternight trilogy and Katherine’s writing, but I wasn’t expecting to love a war story just so much. Laura and Freddie were both extremely layered characters and they both went through gut wrenching journeys from beginning to end.

Set near the end of WWI, we follow the stories of Canadian siblings Laura— nurse who was injured on the front lines and is trying to do what she can from home, and Freddie— soldier in Belgium who’s gone inexplicably missing. When Laura learns of her brothers disappearance and finds the situation suspicious, she decides to travel back to the front lines and find her brother, but strange rumours of a fiddler with powers capable of erasing memory start to trickle in, she finds herself wrapped up into a story far greater than her own.

This story almost felt like a music piece in itself— delicately unravelling, the strains of love and vengeance and perseverance trickling through the louder booms of war. Katherine didn’t flinch from the realities of WII, from the muddy horror of no mans land to the PTSD that follows, but overall, this is a story of hope. And just like when I turned those final few pages of Winter of the Witch, I found myself sitting with the knowledge I’d just read something spectacular. If you’re in any way a fan of Arden’s writing or enjoyed books like Alice Winn’s In Memoriam or Catherynne Valente’s Deathless, you’ll love this. I couldn’t recommend it more.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden was a highly anticipated book of mine and I am thankful to NetGalley and the publisher for granting me an advanced readers copy in exchange for my honest review. Katherine Arden is once again masterful in weaving fantastic elements into a historical setting. The setting of this book is WWI but the focus is not on the politics. Instead it explores the effects of war on the soldiers and how evil could profit off the vulnerability of soldiers who are experiencing hell on earth. There were so many moments of history that were well represented such as the rise in spiritualism, medical advances, and specific tragic battles. I really enjoyed researching the history alongside my read. The magic is the supporting actor to the themes. Some of the common themes explored here are PTSD and memory. The author definitely incorporates the philosophical idea of Nietzsche that memory is what makes us human and I loved that element. There are some very minor subplots of romance that were beautiful and complimentary to the darkness of the setting. Katherine Ardens authorial tone is definitely cemented for me as a haunting one. I find I am still thinking of this story long after closing the book. I deducted one star because I felt like the beginning was a little slow. I enjoyed the setting and the themes more than the characters. It is rare for me to say but I think this book could’ve been just a little longer. I would probably recommend The Bear and the Nightingale to new readers of Arden as a starting point but I think that those who enjoyed the Winternight Trilogy will appreciate this one as well.