Soldiers & Sailors Hardcover by Terrence Holt

Product Details

• Publisher: Liveright (2026-09-15)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 432 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781324098058
• Item Weight: 697.41 grams
• Dimensions: 23.62 x 15.75 x 3.0 cm

"Holt has a resolutely optimistic worldview.... Even the dead, in Holt’s generous vision, can change their stories." —Matthew Keeley, Boston Globe

An elegiac novel of war and peace, of fathers and sons, of fading memory and the terror of what cannot be forgotten, Soldiers & Sailors follows the tortured career of Dr. Hal Adams.

Pursued by a past he cannot bring himself to remember, Hal returns to his decaying Midwestern birthplace, where he takes a job as staff physician at a decrepit veteran’s home. There, Hal finds himself the unwilling audience of his patients’ horrific stories, and descends with them into a Dantesque vision of the hell of war. Fleeing one hell for another, Hal searches the ruins of his ancestral home for clues to his own family’s descent into murder and madness. Between these two worlds, Hal finds a guide in Nell, the wryly attentive receptionist—who harbors her own secrets about both worlds.

The ancient veterans compel Hal to hear what they did and what they suffered, remembering a blood-spattered village in France, or the infernal jungles of New Guinea, the terrors of the Murmansk run or the rail yards of Dachau. Their anguished recollections illuminate this novel like star shells over a darkened battlefield. As the veterans’ war stories grow stranger and more terrible, they lead Hal to a terrifying discovery: about his patients, his family, and his collapsing world.

In Hal’s struggle to rebuild his world on the ruins of his father’s war, Terrence Holt has created a gripping saga, one ringing with the echoes of America’s bloodstained history, and the dire possibilities of our collective future. An epic celebration of the storyteller’s craft, Soldiers & Sailors offers a literary testament to the heroism of those whose sacrifice must never be forgotten.

About the Author

Terrence Holt is the author of In the Valley of the Kings and the widely acclaimed Internal Medicine. Once an internist specializing in geriatric medicine, he now teaches medicine and creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.