The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

[Tricia]

The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a dark, haunting, historical fiction/ghost story set during the turbulent years of World War I. The story revolves around Laura Iven, an army nurse from Halifax, Nova Scotia who was injured while working near the frontlines in Belgium. While recuperating from her injuries at home in Halifax, her parents are killed in the devastating Halifax Narrows explosion. Although a skeptic herself, she receives a message during a seance that her brother is alive, after he had been reported as missing during combat in Flanders. Having lost everything else, she returns to Belgium to find him, and in the hospitals she starts to hear wounded soldiers speak about a mysterious figure they call the Fiddler, who runs a hotel where soldiers can go and forget their pain. Alternating with Laura’s narrative, the book follows Freddie’s experiences in the chaotic aftermath of battle, and his encounters with the Fiddler.

The blending of historical fiction with a ghost story is so effective here. The years during World War I were a time of devastating, widespread loss and change, with so many people experiencing what we would now recognize as PTSD, that it makes perfect sense that the boundary between life and death, reality and the otherworldly, would be blurred. These characters move through the world in a state of desperate longing to hold onto something, trying to process the magnitude of what was happening, between the Great War and the rising Influenza pandemic. The depictions of the lives of the soldiers and the wounded are brutal, as they should be. Arden’s writing is visceral and dreamlike, and that sense of apocalyptic unreality is so strong that I had to put the book down once or twice to take myself out of it. But ultimately I found this to be a moving, effective, and empathetic way to remember, and try to make sense of that painful, turbulent time.