Devastation Road: A Novel

by Jason Hewitt

Overview

A deeply compelling and poignant story about the tragic lessons of war and the endurance of memory.

In the last months of World War II, a man wakes in a field in a country he does not know. Injured and with only flashes of memory coming back to him, he pulls himself to his feet and starts to walk, setting out on an extraordinary journey in search of his home, his past, and himself.

His name is Owen. A war he has only a vague recollection of joining is in its dying days, and as he tries to get back to England, he becomes caught up in the flood of rootless people pouring through Europe. Among them is a teenage boy, and together they form an unlikely alliance as they cross battle-worn Germany.

When they meet a troubled young woman, tempers flare and scars are revealed as Owen gathers up the shattered pieces of his life. No one is as he remembers, not even himself. How can he truly return home when he hardly recalls what home is?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316316354
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	07/03/2017
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Jason Hewitt is a novelist, playwright and actor. He was born in Oxford, and lives in London. His debut novel, The Dynamite Room, was long-listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Authors' Club First Novel Award.

Editorial Reviews

05/01/2017
Hewitt’s profoundly moving thriller, his second novel after 2015’s The Dynamite Room, charts the harrowing journey of Owen, a British flight engineer suffering from amnesia, across war-torn Europe during the last days of WWII. Owen must somehow get from rural Czechoslovakia back home to England, all the while trying to remember exactly who he is. As he slowly pieces together the disjointed memories of his past, Czech teenager Janek Sokol and a Polish woman with a newborn baby join him in attempting to maneuver through a nightmarish landscape of mass death and destruction. Comparable to Kosinki’s The Painted Bird in both theme and gruesome imagery, Hewitt’s travelogue fluctuates between clarity and confusion, keeping the reader in a continual state of uncertainty. Sublime imagery (“Thin-framed dragonflies motored about like silent biplanes”) is a plus. Readers will undoubtedly feel a sense of overwhelming sorrow by the end. But that very well may be the point. Agent: Will Francis, Janklow & Nesbit. (July)

Publishers Weekly

PRAISE FOR DEVASTATION ROAD:

"There's a world of suffering in this story, sincerely portrayed...Hewitt delivers an intriguingly structured sidebar to World War II."—Kirkus

"A truly absorbing read, the kind you finish in a single sitting, and...a most welcome addition to the body of wartime tales."
—Rosemary Goring, Sunday Herald

"Utterly magnificent. A passionate, intelligent and lyrical book, whose characters are compelling, intricate, complex, surprising people."—Manda Scott, author of Into the Fire

"Told with aching realism, it is the story of one man's search for himself amidst the terror of war.... A gripping novel that will stay with you long after you have read the last page."—Sophia Whitfield, Culture Street

"A wide-reaching and poignant evocation of WWII and its landswept aftermath. Told in exquisite prose, Owen's journey builds to a powerful and yes devastating-finale. The most moving and gripping novel I've read in a long while."—Alex Preston, author of In Love and War

"A hypnotic and heartrending tale of fragmented wartime memories. Beautifully written."—Juliet West, author of Before the Fall

"Conjuring up the confusion of terror and war in which Hewitt's central character struggles to reclaim his sense of self."—Nick Rennison, London Sunday Times

From the Publisher

03/01/2017
As World War II winds down, a man wakes up on a battlefield with no memory of who he is and begins the long, arduous walk across shattered Germany toward England, which he barely remembers as home. Long-listed for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction; Hewitt debuted with The Dynamite Room, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick.

Library Journal

2017-04-18
One man's splintered consciousness symbolizes the fracture and confusion spanning Europe after World War II.In a ravaged landscape strewn with wreckage and bodies, where order has broken down and the population is in flux, a man named Owen Thomas wakes up in a field, in pain, wearing ill-fitting clothes and possessed of mere crumbs of memory. This nightmarish, otherworldly scenario comes slowly into focus as taking place in Czechoslovakia midway through 1945. Owen, concussed and bewildered, finds a companion in the form of Janek, a Czech teenager who's on a mission to find his brother, Petr, a resistance leader. The two start walking together, glimpsing terrors as they proceed, grabbing food and shelter where they can. Encountering other refugees, including Irena, a desperate Polish Jew with a baby, they become part of a human wave moving west, trying to stay ahead of the Russians. Owen has elusive flashbacks to his past in Britain, which sometimes include his brother, Max, or Max's girlfriend, Connie, or a working life, and slowly the pieces join together, exposing some shameful truths. Irena is searching for the man who raped her so she can give him back her unwanted child. This small band of survivors, connected by quests, falsehoods, and betrayals, is emblematic of tens of thousands of damaged, displaced persons depicted by British writer Hewitt (The Dynamite Room, 2015) in a vista of camps and clotted highways familiar from period newsreels. The book's most intriguing aspect is the intricate looping of Owen's memories, which contribute a fever-dream thread of discovery to an otherwise somewhat formless structure. There's a world of suffering in this story, sincerely portrayed, yet strangely short on warmth. As in his debut, Hewitt delivers an intriguingly structured sidebar to World War II, but this time the technique holds greater fascination than the characters.

Kirkus Reviews