In 1938, before the Munich pact, Gellhorn visited Prague and witnessed its transformation from a proud democracy preparing to battle Hitler to a country occupied by the German army. Born out of this experience, A Stricken Field follows a journalist who returns to Prague after its annexation and finds her efforts to obtain help for the refugees and to convey the shocking state of the country both frustrating and futile. A convincing account of a people under the brutal oppression of the Gestapo, A Stricken Field is Gellhorn’s most powerful work of fiction.

 

“[A] brave, final novel. Its writing is quick with movement and with sympathy; its people alive with death, if one can put it that way. It leaves one with aching heart and questing mind.”—New York Herald Tribune

 

“The translation of [Gellhorn’s] personal testimony into the form of a novel has . . . force and point.”—Times Literary Supplement

Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998) was one of the best-known war correspondents of the twentieth century, as well as a novelist and travel writer and, briefly, Hemingway’s third wife. Over the course of her career, she reported on the Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War in the Middle East, the civil wars in Central America, and other major events. She is the author of the novels The Wine of Astonishment and The Face of War and of the memoir Travels with Myself and Another, an account of her life with Hemingway.    

— New York Times

— New York Herald Tribune

— Times Literary Supplement

— Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

— Anne Boyd Rioux, LitHub