Fall 1942. The bridge falls. So does everything else. Thirteen German saboteurs slip behind Soviet lines to destroy a single bridge feeding ammunition into Stalingrad. The mission succeeds in minutes. Surviving it takes everything else. What follows isn't a story about heroes - it's about the men left behind once the ideology stops mattering. Captured and shipped to a Gulag mine in the Urals, they trade one war for another: hunger, betrayal, and a tunnel that may not lead anywhere at all.
Told through the alternating voices of the men who lived it - soldiers, a Soviet defector with nothing left to lose, and interrogators on both sides who never learn the whole truth - Deeper Than Darkness asks what's left of a person once the flag, the oath, and the enemy all stop meaning anything. There are no clean sides in this story. Only the ones who make it out - and the ones who don't get to choose how."A war novel for readers of All the Light We Cannot See and The Book Thief - but without the mercy."
Fall 1942. The bridge falls. So does everything else. Thirteen German saboteurs slip behind Soviet lines to destroy a single bridge feeding ammunition into Stalingrad. The mission succeeds in minutes. Surviving it takes everything else. What follows isn't a story about heroes - it's about the men left behind once the ideology stops mattering. Captured and shipped to a Gulag mine in the Urals, they trade one war for another: hunger, betrayal, and a tunnel that may not lead anywhere at all.
Told through the alternating voices of the men who lived it - soldiers, a Soviet defector with nothing left to lose, and interrogators on both sides who never learn the whole truth - Deeper Than Darkness asks what's left of a person once the flag, the oath, and the enemy all stop meaning anything. There are no clean sides in this story. Only the ones who make it out - and the ones who don't get to choose how."A war novel for readers of All the Light We Cannot See and The Book Thief - but without the mercy."