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Sign up todayA Soldier of the Great War
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Learn moreFrom acclaimed novelist Mark Helprin comes a lush, literary epic about love, beauty, and the world at war.
Alessandro Giuliani, the young son of a prosperous Roman lawyer, enjoys an idyllic life full of privilege: he races horses across the country to the sea, he climbs mountains in the Alps, and, while a student of painting at the ancient university in Bologna, he falls in love. Then the Great War intervenes. Half a century later, in August of 1964, Alessandro, a white-haired professor, tall and proud, meets an illiterate young factory worker on the road. As they walk toward Monte Prato, a village seventy kilometers away, the old man—a soldier and a hero who became a prisoner and then a deserter, wandering in the hell that claimed Europe—tells him how he tragically lost one family and gained another. The boy, envying the richness and drama of Alessandro's experiences, realizes that this magnificent tale is not merely a story: it's a recapitulation of his life, his reckoning with mortality, and, above all, a love song for his family.
Mark Helprin is the acclaimed author of Winter’s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, Freddy and Fredericka, In Sunlight and in Shadow, Memoir from Antproof Case, and numerous other works, including four that made the New York Times bestsellers list. His novels are translated into over twenty languages and read around the world. He was educated at Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford and served in the Israeli Army, Israeli Air Force, and British Merchant Navy.
David Colacci is an actor and director who has directed and performed in prominent theaters nationwide. His credits include roles from Shakespeare to Albee, as well as extensive work on new plays. As a narrator, he has won numerous Earphones Awards, earned Audie Award nominations, and been included in Best Audio of the Year lists by such publications as Publishers Weekly, AudioFile magazine, and Library Journal. He was a resident actor and director with the Cleveland Play House for eight years and has been artistic director of the Hope Summer Rep Theater since 1992.
Reviews
“Extraordinary…A vast, ambitious, spiritually lusty, all-guzzling, all-encompassing novel.”
“A rousing tale…riotous energy and sustained brilliance…Helprin lights his own way, in his own singular direction.”
“Intense, memorable…magnificent…A massive, soaring novel of ideas and ordeals.”
“Energetic prose, poetic images of great intensity, and an antic imagination combine in this gripping moral fable narrated by a septuagenarian irrevocably altered by World War I.”
“The language is rich without cloying, complex yet luminous in Helprin’s best style. In a number of thoughtful philosophical passages as engaging as any adventure story, Alesandro struggles to reconcile his appreciation of beauty and his religious faith with the horror around him. That he finally persuades us to believe in a ‘God without any hope, in a God of splendor and terror’ is testimony to the indomitable human spirit. Highly recommended.”
“[An] ebullient, elegiac novel of destruction and survival…Tender, optimistic, and sumptuously presented: a feast of a novel, right down to Alessandro’s tender lingering over the final course.”
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