A week after discovering his fiancée's infidelity with a Rhodes scholar from Brazil, and two days after graduating from Monroe Hill College with a degree in cello performance, Gerard Kelderman—the son of a Flemish master diamond cutter—enters the army as an enlisted parachute infantryman. While the tension between Gerard and his fellow recruits exerts such pressure on him that he is forced into unpracticed roles of leadership and decisiveness, he also experiences flashbacks of his past relationships with women and a thawing of the suppressed memory of his baby sister's death in Belgium when he was seven years old.

Category: mainstream novel
327 pages