Publisher's Synopsis
A small masterpiece with a vast canvas - three major wars of the twentieth century, no less - and a strong emotional charge, this is a taut, moving novel about old men, young men and war, about memory and imagination and the gap between. A recently widowed old man, MacIver, has holed up in the holiday home he shared with his wife. He makes rules to "stop the rot", as he and his house crumble away - what he must burn, when he should eat, how to write something everyday. Gradually a strange and gripping parallel tale is born of men in the trenches of the Great War; while MacIver recalls, too, his own experiences of war. It's winter and he is dying; but his memories, tender, sardonic, even hopeful, glint as brightly as a gold watch in the Flanders mud.
