From the author of Swift comes a new and suspenseful realistic novel of war, love, and survival during the attack on Sportplatz in Julich, Germany, the early part of December 1944. The book explores the highest levels of human intensity and experience: intense visceral combat; random and violent death; deep love and commitment; and remarkable and painful survival and recovery. Shearer describes the work as a secondary historical memoir—a retelling of the attack on an athletic complex as first narrated by his father and the men he commanded.

The events described in Shearer’s book occurred during World War II near the war’s end, prior to and just after December 1, 1944, and shortly before the Battle of Bulge. Military personnel, locations, battles, and sequences of events have not been altered for the sake of the narrative, and soldiers’ names, who were engaged in the battle, are accurate. However, Shearer’s use of subjective thoughts and conversations that offer transition and personalized contexts, though fictional, heighten the human element and remind us again of the horror of war and its effect upon human life.