Remembered Soldier

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTTHE NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2025THE NEW YORK TIMES "e;The Best Historical Fiction Novels to Read Right Now"e;PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 2025 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARAn extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination.Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognises Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she s telling the truth?In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatised man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest works of literature can achieve.