The Verdun Affair

Starred review from April 16, 2018
Dybek’s gripping second novel (after When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man), a cleverly constructed page-turner, travels back and forth in time between a European continent devastated by World War I and 1950s Hollywood. Tom Combs is an American ambulance driver who stays on in the war’s aftermath to work for a priest, collecting the bones of dead soldiers from the battlefields of Verdun. He falls in love with Sarah Hagen, a fellow American, but she has come to France looking for news of her “missing, believed dead” husband. Sarah goes off in search of information, and Tom takes a job as a journalist in Paris. They meet again in Bologna in 1922, when a soldier creates a sensation after showing up in a hospital there with no recollection of who he is. Sarah believes the mysterious soldier is her husband, though others have reason to believe
otherwise. Years later, Tom, working in Hollywood, comes across Paul, a fellow journalist from those heady days in Italy, and, reliving their unresolved past, they discover each entertains a different version of the truth. Dybek is a master at creating an atmosphere of war, of decadence amid the rubble, and at dipping in and out of history, teasing the reader with beguiling clues concerning the secrets each character harbors about the amnesiac. Dybek’s novel is a complex tale of memory, choice, and the sacrifices one sometimes makes by doing the right thing. Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group.

Listeners will be quickly drawn into this romantic novel set in two time periods. Tom, a young American orphan, found himself working for room, board, and a small stipend at the Verdun battlefield in 1921, helping the priests with anything they needed, including collecting bones for an ossuary. When, in 1950, he unexpectedly reconnects with Paul, his thoughts return to that past to find meaning and closure. Narrator Jacques Roy transports Tom and listeners back through those memories with an incredible performance. Speaking in the first person as Tom, Roy keeps his voice even and well paced as Tom ponders his memories and regrets. French accents for the priests, an Austrian accent for Paul, and unique voices for Sarah and even minor characters who appear only once add emotional power to a love story that examines the human costs of war. N.E.M. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine