Great read
Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks, Hutchinson
This bewitching and sprawling novel encompasses a five-part journey set in Austria. As with all of Faulks’ work, the power of the language is immediately gripping, the descriptions intense and vivid. While this is the second in what will ultimately be a trilogy, which started with Human Traces published back in 2005, it very much reads as a stand-alone tale. The landscape spans 1906 to 1933, taking in WWI and the pre-WWII rise of Nazism.
We start in a makeshift military field hospital where a surgeon is grappling to operate on an unconscious man tagged A. Heideck. Under the light of flickering kerosene lamps he stretches the patient’s ribs apart to reveal “an indifferent heart twitching in its bony cage” and ultimately manages to
