The Verdun Affair, Nick Dybek
The Verdun Affair, Nick Dybek
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The Verdun Affair

Author: Nick Dybek

Narrator: Jacques Roy

Unabridged: 8 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/12/2018


Synopsis

Across a continent still reeling from World War I, a “ravishingly beautiful” (Paula McClain) story about a love affair between two Americans and the lie that changes everything.

France, 1921—Tom, a young American orphaned in World War I, is working at an ossuary in Verdun, helping priests comfort families seeking answers about their loved ones. But nothing in his past—not his rough-and-tumble Chicago childhood nor his experiences driving ambulances across French battlefields—can prepare Tom for the arrival of Sarah Hagen. From the moment he sees her, a young woman in a blue dress desperate for news of her missing husband, he knows he will help her in any way he can.

As their affair takes them across a fractured Europe, Tom and Sarah reckon with the ways extraordinary circumstances impact the lives of ordinary people. They eventually part but when news of an amnesiac soldier in Naples reaches Tom in Paris, he sets off, only to find Sarah there, hopeful as ever, along with an Austrian journalist named Paul who has his own agenda. Years later, a chance encounter with Paul forces Tom, now a screenwriter in Hollywood, to confront his past—and the woman he’s never been able to forget.

A page-turning, vividly imagined, and deeply romantic novel about love and identity, truth and consequences, The Verdun Affair is a “literary romance…[that] unravels a love triangle and its players’ secrets” (Los Angeles Times). It will transport you to another place and time while asking the question: Who are you in a world you no longer recognize?

About Nick Dybek

Nick Dybek is a recipient of a Granta New Voices selection, a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and a Maytag Fellowship. He received a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches at Oregon State University. He is the author of When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man and The Verdun Affair.


Reviews

3.5 stars . I don’t remember reading a book and feeling as if I could actually hear the voice of the narrator. This was not an audio version of the book. I read it, yet the voice of the narrator spoke to me as if I was hearing a narrator of an old movie, quiet and melancholic. His name is Tom, an Am......more

Goodreads review by Bandit

Love a good work of historical fiction and nothing makes quite for the same sort of drama as war times. This one had just about all of the right ingredients for a veritable literary feast…it was well researched, well composed, had the right amount of dramatic tautness, a mystery, a love story…and ye......more

In today's historical fiction market if you are choosing to write about WWI or WWII you really need to feel confident that you have a special story to tell; otherwise you are just contributing to the over saturation of the market. Unfortunately The Verdun Affair didn't hold anything truly new or int......more

Goodreads review by Jody

It’s unfair to compare Nick to his father, Stuart. I will say, independently, that I have enjoyed everything I’ve read by Stuart Dybek. However, this novel really failed to hold my attention. Perhaps it’s partly my fault, though I was sober every time I read it, which I can’t say about many books I’v......more

Goodreads review by John

I loved this novel! The writing was exquisite, often poetic but not flowery, always careful, employing an economy of language that evoked rather than explained or ornamented what's being presented. I thought it was reflective, but not derivative, of Hemingway's Farewell to Arms. The Great War, WWI,......more