Pub date ? Finishes ?

32.5mm

mantle.panmacmillan.com

90100

9 781447 255017

ISBN 978-1-4472-5501-7

The pain woke him. He was grateful for it. The train had stopped and somewhere, up above them, the drone of aircraft engines filled the night sky. He could almost remember her smile . . . It must be the morphine . . . He had managed not to think about her for months now.

1944. Paul Brandt, a soldier in the German army, returns wounded and ashamed from the bloody chaos of the Eastern Front to find his village home much changed and existing in the dark shadow of an SS rest hut – a luxurious retreat for those who manage the concentration camps, run with the help of a small group of female prisoners who, against all odds, have so far survived the war. When, by chance, Brandt glimpses one of these prisoners, he realizes that he must find a way to access the hut. For inside is the woman to whom his fate has been tied since their arrest five years before, and now he must do all he can to protect her. But as the Russian offensive moves ever closer, the days of the rest hut and its SS inhabitants are numbered. And while hope – for Brandt and the female prisoners – draws tantalizingly close, the danger too is now greater than ever. Meanwhile, in a forest to the east, a young female Soviet tank driver awaits her orders to advance . . .

£16.99

‘What are you going to do, now that you’re back here?’

‘I plan to make amends,’ Brandt said. ‘For all of my sins.’

‘An extraordinary novel, with the intensity and pace of a thriller, and a wisdom and subtlety all of its own. I was gripped to the very last page’

Antonia Hodgson, author of The Devil in the Marshalsea

‘A nuanced, complex and gripping tale of love and guilt’ A. L. Kennedy

William Ryan is an Irish writer living in London. His Korolev series, set in 1930s Stalinist Russia, has been shortlisted for the Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year Award, the CWA New Blood Dagger, the Irish Fiction Award and the Ireland AM Irish Crime Novel of the Year Award. The Constant Soldier is his fourth novel. William lectures on creative writing at City University.

Discover more at facebook.com/WilliamRyanAuthor @WilliamRyan_www.william-ryan.com

Fiction Cover Images © Shutterstock, Mark Owen Arcangel Images & Uilstein Bild/Getty Images. Author photo © Kate Eshelby

From the author of The Holy Thief

Constant Soldier HBR RYAN.indd 1 23/06/2016 09:54