Peace: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

"Brilliant." --The New York Times Book Review"Embedded in a landscape at once bleak and beautiful, Peace, like other classic war stories, discloses in the sparest language the spiritual darkness of war." --O, The Oprah Magazine"Perfect. . . . Bausch slips you so smoothly and unnervingly into the world of these young soldiers on patrol that you won't quite know how you got there. . . . His narrative moves like a cat on the hunt: supple and strong, without an ounce of energy wasted." --Seattle Times "A spare and haunting meditation on the confusing and contradictory choices wars inflict on those who fight them." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune"Every single word of Richard Bausch's beautiful, spare new novel Peace rings darkly, tragically true."--Richard Russo"Richard Bausch's Peace, set at the end of the Second World War in Italy, is a small masterpiece with the same emotional force and moral complexity as Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Tolstoy's Hadji Murad."--Colm Tóibín "The experiences of battle fatigue and constant exposure to mortal danger are depicted with raw immediacy and terse power in this short novel from veteran Bausch. . . . [E]choes of Stephan Crane, James Jones and particularly William Styron's The Long March. But Bausch sustains a gripping atmosphere of wintry dread, and he keeps the reader hooked with subtly accreting little surprises. . . . Bausch admirably turns a familiar story into something genuinely new."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"An abrupt and chilling act of violence opens Bauch's 11th novel, marking the beginning of a bleak but compelling meditation on the moral dimensions of warfare."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)"[A] consummate and versatile short story writer and novelist tells one soldier's story in a war novel distilled to its chilling essence. . . . Bausch's tale of one act in the immense blood-dark theater of military conflict is razor-sharp, sorrowfully poetic, and steeped in the wretched absurdity of war, the dream of peace."--Booklist (starred review)"Bausch is best known for his short stories, but this powerful novella demonstrates his skill at spare language and tight construction."--Library Journal

During the winter of 1944, three soldiers are sent on a reconnaissance mission up a mountain in Italy, near Mount Cassino, led by seventy-year-old Angelo, an Italian of indeterminate loyalty, and are confronted by the terror, confusion, and hardship of their mission, which is enhanced by a life-altering encounter with a sniper, in a story of the human cost of war. Reprint.