I'm typically not big on ghost stories. I like my fictional characters to be solid, corporeal and usually alive. So it's a testament to Katherine Arden's prior work that I eagerly awaited THE WARM HANDS OF GHOSTS, despite the fact that the word "ghosts" is right there in the title. This book is about ghosts, to be sure, and it has its fair share of haunts and spirits of various kinds --- not to mention one of the most memorable devils in recent fiction. But these ghosts, in Arden's skillful hands, shed light on the all-too-solid and corporeal realities of World War I.

"THE WARM HANDS OF GHOSTS, which is the product of many years of research, offers an intriguing mix of well-drawn historical fiction and fantasy."

When the novel opens, it's early 1918, and everyone's hopes are pinned on the Americans who have just entered the fray but are taking a bit too long to make their presence known. The war has already seemed endless for Laura Iven, who has returned home to Halifax, Nova Scotia, after being wounded while serving as a nurse on the Belgian front. Her brother, Freddie, is still fighting overseas --- at least that's her assumption --- until she receives a package with his uniform jacket and both of his dogtags, along with a cryptic note. Laura, who recently lost her parents following a devastating explosion in the Halifax Harbor, is all alone in the world if she's lost Freddie.

So despite her reservations, Laura seizes an opportunity to accompany a fellow nurse back to the front to search for her brother. She is accompanied by another woman, Mrs. Shaw, who has lost her son and is desperate to find out what happened to him.

In a parallel narrative, readers learn about the fate of Freddie, who, a few months earlier, was essentially buried alive in a so-called pillbox, or concrete guard station. His only living companion? A German soldier named Winter. Injured, terrified and in complete darkness, the two grow close through their shared humanity and the stories they tell one another. Even if they have a chance to escape, they're likely doomed, given the fact that they’re fighting on opposite sides. Either they're enemies or they're traitors.

As the two narratives converge both chronologically and geographically, a shadowy figure named Faland ties them together. The proprietor of a mysterious guest house, a brilliant violinist and possibly a thief of souls, Faland offers victims of trauma --- of which there is no shortage in the lands around Ypres --- the lure of forgetting, of oblivion. But at what cost?

THE WARM HANDS OF GHOSTS, which is the product of many years of research, offers an intriguing mix of well-drawn historical fiction and fantasy. On one level it's a family saga, the story of a brother and sister desperate to find their way back to one another, and to something resembling safety. But it's also a romance, a ghost story, and a fascinating interrogation of a time when the world was right on the brink of what we might call modernity, where old superstitions and deadly modern technology overlapped in new and terrifying ways.