THE VERDUN AFFAIR is a deeply moving and evocative novel about a passionate love affair and the tragedy of wartime, set during the tumultuous years of post-World War I Europe.
Nick Dybek Book order
Nick Dybek writes with an unusual combination of raw power and poetry, often delving into complex family dynamics and moral quandaries. His style is marked by a sharp insight into the human psyche and an ability to evoke an unsettling atmosphere. With precision and rhythm in his prose, Dybek explores themes of loss, guilt, and the search for identity. His works resonate with a strong sense of place and emotional depth.
- 2018
- 2018
In 1920, two young Americans meet in Verdun, the city in France where one of the most devastating battles of the war was waged. Tom is an orphan from Chicago, a former ambulance driver now gathering bones from the battlefield; Sarah is an expatriate from Boston searching for the husband who wandered off from his division and hasn't been seen since. Quickly, the two fall into a complicated affair against the ghostly backdrop of the ruined city. Months later, Sarah and Tom meet again at the psychiatric ward of an Italian hospital, drawn there by the appearance of a mysterious patient the doctors call Douglas Fairbanks (after the silent film actor) - a shell-shocked soldier with no memory of who he is. At the hospital, Tom and Sarah are joined by Paul, an Austrian journalist with his own interest in the amnesiac. Each is keeping a secret; each has been shaken by the horrors of war. Decades later, Tom, now a successful screenwriter, encounters Paul by chance in LA, still grappling with the questions raised by this gorgeous and incisive novel: How to begin again after unfathomable trauma? How to love after so much loss? And who, in the end, was Douglas Fairbanks?
- 2012
Follows the experiences of a youth whose family and island community entirely depend on the king crab trade that constantly risks his father's life, a situation that is further threatened by a new fleet owner's intentions of selling away the island's livelihood.
