War and Turpentine: A novel

One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2016

An international best seller: a vivid, masterly novel about a Flemish man who reconstructs his grandfather's story—his hopes, loves, and art, all disrupted by the First World War—from the unflinching notebooks he filled with pieces of his life.

The life of Urbain Martien—artist, soldier, survivor of World War I—lies contained in two notebooks he left behind when he died in 1981. His grandson, a wr…