Skip to main content

A Stricken Field

A Novel

With a new Foreword by Caroline Moorehead

Martha Gellhorn was one of the first—and most widely read—female war correspondents of the twentieth century. She is best known for her fearless reporting in Europe before and during WWII and for her brief marriage to Ernest Hemingway, but she was also an acclaimed novelist.

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

328 pages | 5 1/4 x 8 | © 2011

Fiction

History: European History

Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature

Reviews

“Miss Gellhorn . . . is an admirable reporter. She has intelligence, feeling, a seeing eye, and she writes a clean, contemporary prose. . . . [A Stricken Field] is a compelling book and a moving one.”

New York Times

“[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

"[A Stricken Field] is a gut-punch of a novel that powerfully illustrates how Western societies fail in their duty to protect the most vulnerable among us: stateless and homeless refugees."

Anne Boyd Rioux | LitHub

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press