Publication Day: The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead

Robert Olmstead is the author of the national bestseller Coal Black Horse and Far Bright Star, which won the Western Writers of America Spur Award. An amazing writer whose work has been compared to Cormac McCarthy and Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, his latest work The Coldest Night has already started getting rave reviews from media and booksellers.

To celebrate the publication day of this new book, we’ll be giving away 3 copies. Leave a comment below to enter!

About the Book:

Award-winning novelist Robert Olmstead mounts a fast-moving tale of a love story—as destructive as it is irresistible—that sets a boy’s course toward an epic and life-changing battle. Henry Childs is just seventeen when he falls into a love affair so intense it nearly consumes him. But when young Mercy’s disapproving father threatens Henry’s life, Henry runs as far as he can–to the other side of the world.

It is 1950, and the Korean War hangs in the balance. Descended from a long line of soldiers, Henry enlists in the marines and arrives in Korea on the eve of the brutal seventeen-day battle of the Chosin Reservoir–the turning point of the war–completely unprepared for the forbidding Korean landscape and the unimaginable circumstances of a war well beyond the scope of anything his ancestors ever faced. But the challenges he meets upon his return home, scarred and haunted, are greater by far.

Robert Olmstead’s riveting new novel is not only a passionate story of love and war, it is a timeless and contemporary story of soldiers coming home to a country with little regard for, and even less knowledge of, what they’ve confronted. Through Henry, Olmstead charts the unspoken truth about combat: that for many men, the experience of war is the most enlivening, electric, and extraordinary experience of their lives.

Praise for The Coldest Night:

“Thought-provoking [and] unabashedly romantic” –O, The Oprah Magazine

“[An] elegiac, gritty coming-of-age novel.” --Publishers Weekly, starred review

“It’s extremes that rivet us in Olmstead’s searing seventh novel: the heaven of first love; the hell of the battlefield . . . Olmstead’s extraordinary language gives us new eyes. An exceptionally fine study of love, war and the double-edged role of memory, which can both sustain and destroy. Prize-winning material.”–Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Olmstead (Coal Black Horse) has a spare, direct style that is most effective in the brilliant, engrossing combat descriptions and ironic marine banter.”–Library Journal

“Olmstead employs different authorial voices to shape the story. At times the tone is mythic, at times surreal . . . The Coldest Night is powerful, and often beautiful, storytelling.” –Booklist

Read an excerpt:

Tags: Coal Black Horse, Far Bright Star, Robert Olmstead, The Coldest Night