Peace, a novel

Richard Bausch's Peace wins Dayton Peace Prize!

To read the announcements follow this link AND this link.

From the prize-winning novelist and world-renowned short story writer, recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Academy Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, a powerful novel about war, trust, and salvation that begs to be read in a single sitting.

Italy, near Cassino. The terrible winter of 1944. A dismal icy rain, continuing unabated for days. Guided by a seventy-year-old Italian man in rope-soled shoes, three American soldiers are sent on a reconnaissance mission up the side of a steep hill that they discover, before very long, to be a mountain. And the old man’s indeterminate loyalties only add to the terror and confusion that engulf them on that mountain, where they are confronted with the horror of their own time—and then set upon by a sniper.

Taut and propulsive—with its spare language, its punishing landscape, and the keenly drawn portraits of the three young soldiers at its center—Peace is a feat of economy, compression, and imagination, a brutal and unmistakably contemporary meditation on the corrosiveness of violence, the human cost of war, and the redemptive power of mercy.

“Brilliant.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Embedded in a landscape at once bleak and beautiful, Peace, like other classic war stories, discloses in the sparest language the spiritual darkness of war.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“Perfect… Bausch slips you so smoothly and unnervingly into the world of these young soldiers on patrol that you won't quite know how you got there… His narrative moves like a cat on the hunt: supple and strong, without an ounce of energy wasted.”
—Seattle Times

“Every single word of Richard Bausch’s beautiful, spare new novel Peace rings darkly, tragically true.”
—Richard Russo

“A spare and haunting meditation on the confusing and contradictory choices wars inflict on those who fight them.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“The experiences of battle fatigue and constant exposure to mortal danger are depicted with raw immediacy and terse power in this short novel from veteran Bausch… [E]choes of Stephan Crane, James Jones and particularly William Styron’s The Long March. But Bausch sustains a gripping atmosphere of wintry dread, and he keeps the reader hooked with subtly accreting little surprises… Bausch admirably turns a familiar story into something genuinely new.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Buy Peace at Amazon.com or Amazon.co/uk.