"The mist clings to the barley like a dying man's breath…"

In the summer of 1747, Private Thomas Wren marches into hell at the Battle of Lauffeldt—eighteen years old, terrified, and already certain he will not survive. Across the Channel, in a quiet Kent cottage thick with the hum of bees and the weight of waiting, his sister Ruth and mother Eliza hold the fragile threads of home together with prayer, pride, and quiet fury.

Torn between brutal frontline realism and tender domestic intimacy, *Red for the King, White for the Grave* is a luminous debut that redefines the war novel. With prose as lyrical as it is unflinching, Stuart Tanner masterfully weaves parallel timelines of battlefield horror and hearthside resilience, revealing how love, memory, and the smallest acts of courage can stitch a soul back together—even after war has shattered it beyond recognition.

For readers of *All the Light We Cannot See*, *Cold Mountain*, and *The Winter Soldier*, this is historical fiction at its most poignant and powerful—a story not of glory, but of survival, sacrifice, and the unbreakable bond of family.

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