Centroeuropa

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE

Revelations—and frozen corpses—multiply in a small, European village

“Male, Prussian, hussar soldier, frozen. That was the first body I found while digging in the frozen earth to bury my wife.”

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, European feudalism is starting to crumble. Newly widowed, Redo Hauptshammer arrives in a small town far from home to claim a plot of arable land and the simple life of a farmer. But when Redo begins to dig up the field, the perfectly ...