The German Ward

The love story of the year: a breathtaking new novel from the author of global bestsellers The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder of Jericho. A tale of love between enemies behind the lines of WW1 and the Australian artist who captures their secret.

This is a story about desire.

France, 1915. An English nurse and German doctor fall in love. He is a prisoner of war; she has never cared for rules. Their love is visceral and urgent, forbidden and doomed, and it would have gone unrecorded if not for a series of drawings found more than a century later.

At first the drawings seem insignificant, but the woman who finds them glimpses moments of intimacy and can’t look away. The images become part of a puzzle she wants to solve: who were the lovers, what became of them, and what story of war was the artist trying to tell?