Twenty years old, a pilot who believed with his whole heart that he was fighting for his country, Emil's war ends in fire and black water. He sinks into the dark expecting death.
Instead he wakes on a black-sand shore, eighty-two years in the future, in the fishing village of Saltmere-a place of electric kettles and television, and of Mira, a woman who refuses to be afraid of him.
Given a second life he never earned, Emil builds everything the war stole from him: a marriage, children, grandchildren, decades of ordinary grace. But the war follows him even into his dreams, and what he did as a boy who wanted to fly will not stay buried forever.
A sweeping, heartbreaking story of guilt, atonement, and the life we wish we'd lived-with an ending you will never forget.
