Soldiers & Sailors (A Novel)

Set in Adams, Illinois, a once-thriving Mississippi River town, Soldiers & Sailors is a haunting war novel by award-winning physician Terrence Holt that follows the tortured life of Dr. Hal Adams as he flees a medical practice and returns to his decaying Midwest home. Accepting a job as a staff physician at a veteran’s home, Hal encounters patients, whether real or imagined, who transport him to the horrors of World War II, his only relief being a receptionist named Nell.

Adams must reckon—in Ancient Mariner style—with the grotesque, subterranean realities of war—be it unspeakable murders in the caves of France, the Battle of Midway, or the jungles of New Guinea. Weaving together his patients’ relentless nightmares with the trauma of his mother’s murder and father’s apparent suicide, Soldiers & Sailors—with its salvos of some of the most rhapsodic prose in recent American fiction—recasts the great American epic for the twenty-first century.