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The Coldest Night

About the Book

The Coldest Night

Award-winning novelist Robert Olmstead, author of the bestselling Coal Black Horse, mounts a fast-moving tale of a love affair—as destructive as it is irresistible—that sets a boy’s course toward an epic and life-changing battle.

Henry Childs is just seventeen when he falls into a love affair so intense it nearly consumes him. But when young Mercy’s disapproving father threatens Henry’s life, Henry runs as far as he can—to the other side of the world.

The time is 1950, and the Korean War hangs in the balance. Descended from a long line of soldiers, Henry enlists in the Marines and arrives in Korea on the eve of the brutal seventeen- day battle of the Chosin Reservoir—the turning point of the war—completely unprepared for the forbidding Korean landscape and the unimaginable circumstances of a war well beyond the scope of anything his ancestors ever faced. But the challenges he meets upon his return home, scarred and haunted, are greater by far.

Robert Olmstead’s riveting new novel is not only a passionate story of love and war, it is a timeless and contemporary story of soldiers coming home to a country with little regard for, and even less knowledge of, what they’ve confronted. Through Henry, Olmstead charts the unspoken truth about combat: that for many men, the experience of war is the most enlivening, electric, and extraordinary experience of their lives.

The Coldest Night
by Robert Olmstead

  • Publication Date: April 3, 2012
  • Genres: Historical Fiction
  • Hardcover: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Algonquin Books
  • ISBN-10: 161620043X
  • ISBN-13: 9781616200435