The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason

 How can a story about a remote field-hospital ravaged by typhus be funny? Read it and find out.

I fell in love with Mason's writing after reading North House. The Winter Soldier didn't disappoint. Just as funny, just as jam packed with quirky characters. I don't know how Mason does it. Every story he tells is indefinable. Romance, mystery, historical fiction. This book has it all.

From the back

Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, only to find himself posted to a remote field-hospital ravaged by typhus. Supplies have all but run out, the other doctors have fled, and only a single nurse remains, from whom he must learn a brutal, makeshift medicine.

Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue, until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the course of his life.

From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front, The Winter Soldier is the story of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, and of the mistakes we make and the precious opportunities to atone.