This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Christopher Whittaker will be awarding a $10 Amazon OR Barnes and Noble Gift Card (Winner's Choice!!!) to a randomly drawn winner. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.
Two men. Two worlds.
One war that will remake them both.
Peter Schiller, a disciplined officer from privilege, is trained to lead—but not for what war truly demands.
Günther Klein, a working-class recruit, is thrown into the trenches and forced to learn fast or die.
In the mud and ruin of the Great War, rank and class begin to dissolve. Orders blur into instinct. Honour bends under necessity. What remains is survival—and the thin, unspoken bond forged between two men who should never have met.
But war does not end when the guns fall silent.
Heidenröslein is a powerful, unflinching story of war, brotherhood, and the quiet, irreversible cost of becoming what the battlefield demands.
EXCERPT TWO:
The von Schiller estate sat upon a gentle rise overlooking the town, separated from the noise and smoke of industry by iron gates, trimmed hedges, and the unspoken certainty that families like theirs did not belong amongst ordinary life.
The house itself was not ancient enough to be called ancestral in the medieval sense, yet age clung to it all the same. Three stories of pale stone and dark timber stood behind carefully shaped gardens, its tall windows reflecting the morning light like polished glass. Ivy crept deliberately across portions of the outer walls, restrained rather than wild, allowed to grow only where it improved the appearance of age and permanence.
Nothing about the home was accidental.
Even the gravel upon the drive had been chosen for the sound it made beneath carriage wheels.
The front doors opened into a grand receiving hall floored in black-and-white marble tiles imported decades earlier from Italy. The ceilings rose high overhead, crossed with dark wooden beams stained almost black with polish and age. Portraits of Von Schillers long dead stared down from the walls in oils darkened by time—military officers, industrialists, stiff-backed women in lace collars and jewels.
Men who had built.
Men who had commanded.
Men who had expected obedience from the world and usually received it.
The air carried faint scents of furniture wax, old paper, polished silver, and the lingering aroma of Ernst von Schiller’s pipe tobacco.
AUTHOR BIO:
Chris lives in Perth, Western Australia with his wife Dianne.
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