Waterstone’s of King’s Lynn’s Book of the Week is The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

Here’s our weekly look at books with Waterstones of Norfolk Street, Lynn - this week featuring The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden, which is Waterstones Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of the Month for February 2025...

Truly haunting and deeply moving, this blazing historical fantasy from the author of The Bear and the Nightingale mines the horrors of the First World War to generate a story of ghostly soldiers and a potion that can engender oblivion.

World War One, and as shells fall in Northern France, a Canadian nurse searches for her brother believed dead in the trenches.

January 1918. Laura Iven has been discharged from her nurse duties and sent back to Halifax, Canada. Now home, she receives word of her brother's death on the fields of Passchendaele.

Believing he is still alive, and determined to find him, Laura returns to France as a volunteer for a hospital near the front line of battle.

She soon hears whispers of ghosts, and a man known to many as the fiddler whose music allows soldiers to forget the traumas of war. Could her brother’s disappearance have anything to do with him?

November 1917. Freddie Iven awakens after an explosion to find himself trapped underground with an enemy soldier. Against all odds, the two men manage to dig themselves out and, having saved each other’s lives, form an intense bond of friendship.

Now classified as deserters, they are confined to the hellscape of No Man’s Land. And then they meet a man - a fiddler - who seems to have the power to make the murderous chaos surrounding them disappear. But at what price?

BOOK CHART

Compiled by Waterstones, Norfolk Street, King’s Lynn

1. Fourth Wing – Rebecca Yarros

2. Hunted – Abir Mukerjee

3. Lights Out – Navessa Allen

4. Butter – Asako Yuzuki

5. Blue Sisters – Coco Mellors

6. The Warm Hands of Ghosts - Katherine Arden

7. Kala – Colin Walsh

8. The Trading Game – Gary Stevenson

9. The Pumpkin Spice Cafe – Laurie Gilmore

10. The Figurine – Victoria Hislop