Katherine Arden
Tuesday 5th March
Greenside Church, 1b Royal Terrace, Edinburgh, EH7 5AB
7pm
7.30pm
![Katherine Arden](https://cdn.toppingbooks.co.uk/images/Katherine_Arden.width-640.jpg)
It is our joy to welcome Katherine to the Edinburgh bookshop for the first time. Following on from her Winter Night trilogy, Katherine's new novel, The Warm Hands of Ghosts, tells the haunting story of Laura and Freddie Iven: two loving siblings separated by WWI who will do whatever it takes to make it back to one another alive, even if that means making a deal with a devil.
The Warm Hands of Ghosts
January 1918.
Laura Iven has been discharged from her duties as a nurse and sent back to Halifax, Canada, leaving behind a brother still fighting in the trenches of the First World War. Now home, she receives word of Freddie’s death in action along with his uniform -but something doesn’t quite make sense.
Determined to find out more, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital. Soon after arriving, she hears whispers about ghosts moving among those still living and a strange inn-keeper whose wine gives soldiers the gift of oblivion. Could this have happened to Freddie – but if so, where is he?
November 1917.
Freddie Iven awakens after an explosion to find himself trapped under an overturned pillbox with an enemy soldier, a German, each of them badly wounded. Against all odds, the two men form a bond and succeed in clawing their way out. But once in No Man’s Land, where can either of them turn where they won’t be shot as enemy soldiers or deserters? As the killing continues, they meet a man – a fiddler – who seems to have the power to make the hellscape that surrounds them disappear.
But at what price?
About Katherine Arden
Born in Austin, Texas, Katherine Arden has always had a taste for wandering. She spent her junior year of high school in Rennes, France. Following her acceptance to Middlebury College in Vermont, she deferred enrolment for a year in order to live and study in Russia. At Middlebury, she specialized in French and Russian literature, and her studies included sojourns at the Sorbonne in Paris and the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. After receiving her BA, she moved to Maui, Hawaii and worked every kind of odd job imaginable, from grant writing and guiding horse tours to serving as a personal tour guide. During this time she wrote what became her debut novel, The Bear and the Nightingale. After a year on the island, she moved to Brian on, France, and spent nine months teaching. She then returned to Maui, where she began writing The Girl in the Tower, the sequel to her debut, and officially launched her career as an author. Currently she lives in Vermont. She is the author of the Winternight Trilogy for adults and the Small Spaces Quartet for children. The Warm Hands of Ghosts is her eighth novel.