Devastation Road
A Novel
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
A deeply compelling and poignant story about the tragic lessons of war and the endurance of memory.
In the last months of World War II, a man wakes in a field in a country he does not know. Injured and with only flashes of memory coming back to him, he pulls himself to his feet and starts to walk, setting out on an extraordinary journey in search of his home, his past, and himself.
His name is Owen. A war he has only a vague recollection of joining is in its dying days, and as he tries to get back to England, he becomes caught up in the flood of rootless people pouring through Europe. Among them is a teenage boy, and together they form an unlikely alliance as they cross battle-worn Germany.
When they meet a troubled young woman, tempers flare and scars are revealed as Owen gathers up the shattered pieces of his life. No one is as he remembers, not even himself. How can he truly return home when he hardly recalls what home is?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hewitt's profoundly moving thriller, his second novel after 2015's The Dynamite Room, charts the harrowing journey of Owen, a British flight engineer suffering from amnesia, across war-torn Europe during the last days of WWII. Owen must somehow get from rural Czechoslovakia back home to England, all the while trying to remember exactly who he is. As he slowly pieces together the disjointed memories of his past, Czech teenager Janek Sokol and a Polish woman with a newborn baby join him in attempting to maneuver through a nightmarish landscape of mass death and destruction. Comparable to Kosinki's The Painted Bird in both theme and gruesome imagery, Hewitt's travelogue fluctuates between clarity and confusion, keeping the reader in a continual state of uncertainty. Sublime imagery ("Thin-framed dragonflies motored about like silent biplanes") is a plus. Readers will undoubtedly feel a sense of overwhelming sorrow by the end. But that very well may be the point.
