A stunning short novel with breakout potential to exhilerate readers who loved Ian McEwan's Atonement; The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert; and Sandor Marias' Embers. '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.' Colm Toibin

Italy, near Cassino. The terrible winter of 1944. A dismal icy rain falls, unabated, for days.

Three American soldiers set out on the gruelling ascent of a perilous Italian mountainside in the murky closing days of the Second World War. Haunted by their sergeant's cold-blooded murder of a young girl, and with only an old man of uncertain loyalties as their guide, they truge on in a state of barely suppressed terror and confusion. With snipers lying in wait for them, the men are confronted by agonizing moral choices...

Taut and propulsive - Peace is a feat of economy, compression, and imagination, a tough and unmistakably contemporary meditation on the corrosiveness of violence, the human cost of war, and the redemptive power of mercy.