DARKENING STARS: A NOVEL OF THE GREAT WAR

by José Leon Machado

Darkening Stars: A Novel of the Great War is about a young law student who was drafted to serve as a platoon commander in the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps sent to Flanders in 1917. What happened to him and the men under his command, the small and great miseries of their life in the trenches, their links with what they left behind and what they lost, and the incomprehension they met upon returning home, are some of the main lines of this moving and historically accurate portrait of one of the most turbulent periods of Portuguese history. It is also a story of love and of a young man's inner struggles and personal growth, his determined search for peace and happiness, along a path strewn with destruction and trampled dreams.