Burn the Blue Water

From National Book Award finalist Laird Hunt, a novel of love and resistance inspired by the real-life events of The Battle for Crete-for readers of Michael Ondaatje and Sebastian Barry.

On the third Tuesday in May, 1941, the skies over Crete filled with German planes and out came the parachutes. So began the first large-scale airborne invasion of World War II. Against this brutal onslaught, the Cretan civilians brought the tools of the last war: rusty guns, scythes, and even salad forks.

In Burn the Blue Water, eight disparate lives are thrown together in the battle and forever changed: a young German paratrooper learns to fly, a drug-addled soldier makes for the evacuating ships, a gray eminence of the island takes one last stand against the invasion, and at the center of it all, a British nurse risks her life to save her injured fiancé.

In this luminous, polyphonic novel, Laird Hunt-author of the "virtuosic" (The New York Times) Zorrie-plunges us into the heat of the battle, in all its senselessness and terror, and shows the beginnings of the first civilian mass resistance against the Nazis.