By Richard Bausch
192 pages; Knopf

A group of weary young American soldiers trudging through Italy in the twilight of World War II. That is all, and it is everything—the fear and bone-chilling sadness, the poisonous guilt, the aching memory of home. Embedded in a landscape at once bleak and beautiful, Richard Bausch's Peace (Knopf), like other classic war stories—The Naked and the Dead, The Things They Carried, the writings of Stephen Crane—discloses, in the sparest language, the spiritual darkness of war—the hunger for consolation, for a modest ration of love.

— Cathleen Medwick