Winter Soldier (Mason) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Despite its serious concerns, The Winter Soldier brims with improbable narrative pleasures.… These pages crackle with excitement-and charging cavalries, false identities, arranged marriages, scheming industrialists and missing persons.… Within the meticulously researched and magnificently realized backdrop of European dissolution, Mason finds his few lost souls, and shepherds them toward an elusive peace. Lucius's "dream of being able to see another person's thinking" is not only the controlling metaphor of The Winter Soldier, but the work of literature more broadly. Lucius may fail, but the novel he carries is a spectacular success.
Anthony Marra - New York Times Book Review


The beauty of Mason's new novel persists even through scenes of unspeakable agony. That tension reflects the span of his talent.… The story that unfolds in this forsaken place is so captivating that you may feel as unable to leave it as Lucius does.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


Epic.… Daniel Mason has harnessed the harsh clarity of winter to frame his urgent, cinematically beautiful third novel.… Lucius is an irresistible protagonist.… Not only does Mason make every crumb of pertinent history, culture, and geography so real throughout this saga that a reader feels instantly teleported into all of it: The Winter Soldier delivers, in shocking detail, a relentless inventory of the era's medical knowledge and practices.… Mason has created a magnificent world, urging us to savor every grain of it.
Joan Frank - San Francisco Chronicle


As lyrical as a Viennese waltz and as delicate as crystal, Mason's riveting novel examines the human heart and the wounds of war with clear eyes and compassion.
People


What I've found most remarkable about Mason's fiction is the quality of his revelations, his ability to unveil temperaments, habits, natures.… Although The Winter Soldier contains some of the most brutal moments of suffering I've encountered in fiction, they're never there just to move the story along. They allow the reader to sit very close to someone in great pain and listen to him.
Wyatt Mason - New York Times Magazine


[M]oving…. Mason’s old-fashioned novel delivers a sweeping yet intimate account of WWI, and in Lucius, the author has created an outstanding protagonist.
Publishers Weekly


[I]n 1914, Lucius, a promising medical student, enlists in the Imperial Austrian Army and ends up stranded in a typhus-ridden outpost in the Carpathian Mountains.… [L]yrical and affecting novel about the costs of war and lost love. —David Keymer, Cleveland
Library Journal


A sweeping story of love found and lost, steeped in medical details that reveal the full horrors that ill-equipped doctors and nurses faced over years of vicious trench warfare, The Winter Soldier is a vivid account of one man caught up in the epic forces of war.
Booklist


Mason's contribution to war literature involves almost no depiction of fighting but rather its aftermath, the tragically scarred soldiers, and the almost equally traumatized caregivers who sacrifice their health in providing medical help to the wounded.
Kirkus Reviews