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Soldiers & Sailors
Soldiers & Sailors
recounts the struggles of a doctor as he confronts the ghosts of his gruesome past, in the tradition of
Lincoln in the Bardo
.
Set in Adams, Illinois, a once-thriving Mississippi River town, Soldiers & Sailors is a haunting war novel by award-winning physician Terrence Holt that follows the tortured life of Dr. Hal Adams as he flees a medical practice and returns to his decaying Midwest home. Accepting a job as a staff physician at a veteran’s home, Hal encounters patients, whether real or imagined, who transport him to the horrors of World War II, his only relief being a receptionist named Nell.
Adams must reckon—in Ancient Mariner style—with the grotesque, subterranean realities of war—be it unspeakable murders in the caves of France, the Battle of Midway, or the jungles of New Guinea. Weaving together his patients’ relentless nightmares with the trauma of his mother’s murder and father’s apparent suicide, Soldiers & Sailors—with its salvos of some of the most rhapsodic prose in recent American fiction—recasts the great American epic for the twenty-first century.
Set in Adams, Illinois, a once-thriving Mississippi River town, Soldiers & Sailors is a haunting war novel by award-winning physician Terrence Holt that follows the tortured life of Dr. Hal Adams as he flees a medical practice and returns to his decaying Midwest home. Accepting a job as a staff physician at a veteran’s home, Hal encounters patients, whether real or imagined, who transport him to the horrors of World War II, his only relief being a receptionist named Nell.
Adams must reckon—in Ancient Mariner style—with the grotesque, subterranean realities of war—be it unspeakable murders in the caves of France, the Battle of Midway, or the jungles of New Guinea. Weaving together his patients’ relentless nightmares with the trauma of his mother’s murder and father’s apparent suicide, Soldiers & Sailors—with its salvos of some of the most rhapsodic prose in recent American fiction—recasts the great American epic for the twenty-first century.
- GenresFiction
432 pages, Hardcover
Published September 15, 2026
About the author
Terrence Holt
6 books34 followersTerrence Holt taught literature and writing at Rutgers University and Swarthmore College for a decade before attending medical school. Many of these stories have appeared in different forms in literary journals and prize anthologies, including the Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Zoetrope, Bookforum, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. A contributing editor for Men’s Health, Holt teaches and practices medicine at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
Hal Adams, a physician so overcome by having lost a patient that he has abandoned his practice, returns to his boyhood home after learning of the death of his parents, which he’s been given to understand was a murder-suicide in which his father, also a doctor, first killed his wife, who'd been suffering from dementia, then himself.
Home for Adams, the protagonist of Terrence Holt’s “Soldiers & Sailors,” is Adams, Ill., the family namesake, where he decides to stay after being offered a job at the local Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home, a veterans’ rest home and treatment facility, where he attends to patients with horrific accounts of their wartime experiences, including one patient who’d come upon a town that the Germans had torched and most interesting for me, a former WAC who spent time at Los Alamos and later in the Pacific, where she was on hand for the Hiroshima bombing as well as later atomic testing.
Something more, though, than straight wartime accounts seems to be going on in some of the patients’ stories, with their talk of seeing ghosts, which, together with odd experiences Adams himself begins having around both his house and the treatment facility, adds a distinct supernatural overlay to a novel which, as it turns out, is harboring a secret having to do with both the rest home as well as the town itself which moves the novel into distinctly fantastical territory – not, unfortunately, a favorite genre of mine, with my distinct preference for realistic fiction.
Still, if you have an appetite for the fantastical, quite the reading experience Holt’s novel makes for, and rendered with exceptionally fine writing.
Home for Adams, the protagonist of Terrence Holt’s “Soldiers & Sailors,” is Adams, Ill., the family namesake, where he decides to stay after being offered a job at the local Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home, a veterans’ rest home and treatment facility, where he attends to patients with horrific accounts of their wartime experiences, including one patient who’d come upon a town that the Germans had torched and most interesting for me, a former WAC who spent time at Los Alamos and later in the Pacific, where she was on hand for the Hiroshima bombing as well as later atomic testing.
Something more, though, than straight wartime accounts seems to be going on in some of the patients’ stories, with their talk of seeing ghosts, which, together with odd experiences Adams himself begins having around both his house and the treatment facility, adds a distinct supernatural overlay to a novel which, as it turns out, is harboring a secret having to do with both the rest home as well as the town itself which moves the novel into distinctly fantastical territory – not, unfortunately, a favorite genre of mine, with my distinct preference for realistic fiction.
Still, if you have an appetite for the fantastical, quite the reading experience Holt’s novel makes for, and rendered with exceptionally fine writing.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Soldiers & Sailors by Terrence Holt is overall categorized as a war novel with themes of mental hauntings. Set to release on September 15th, 2026, I just want to thank Netgalley and W.W. Norton & Company for the advanced copy for my reading and reviewing pleasure. Now, I love a good, gritty war novel. But it NEEDS to be realistic. I don't want frills. I want the details that terrify me. Mental disorders, through combat in this particular case, are real and need to be respected in a logical manner. The one thing I will say is I'm so sad I didn't have a physical ARC copy, I wanted to highlight passage after passage with continued regularity and display this treasure of a novel properly. The repetition, questions, and short to-the-point sentences, really sent home the trauma induced during times of battle and what they eventually do to a person's mind; a medical POV. 4.5 ⭐
October 2, 2026
Soldiers & Sailors by Terrence Holt looks at the horrors of war by having Dr. Hal Adams return home after the deaths of his parents; his father seems to have one day killed his mother and then himself. Sorting out the familial home and taking on a job at a home for retired veterans leads the doctor to hear various stories of war from people who are trapped dealing with the consequences of what they did or that to which they bore witness. Hal himself is haunted and trying to escape the death of a former patient.
Mixed thoughts:
~I wouldn’t say this is a negative exactly, but this is not a book you can just sit down and blaze through. It makes sense! It’s about weighty material, but it will take you many encounters to finish it, if you’re like me. It’s very heavy and sobering, and the knowledge that the specific stories might not be true but that terrible incidents similar in nature DID happen will have you needing to take breaks.
~I wish there was a tiny bit more depth to the supernatural aspect. It seemed to really be dealt with at nearly the very end of the book and it might have been better if it was examined earlier.
Positive thought:
+The stories all blend together. Not a bad thing! It underscores how the horror of war is relentless and never ends. The scars are ones the veterans not only carry with them forever, but inflict outward on others who never experienced it, like how Hal was never able to get anywhere near his father. The veteran who spoke of what he found in a deserted town was probably the most horrific in a slew of atrocities.
+Even though they blend together, I felt the stories were well done. I could envision the fighting and the death and what horrid things were wrought by war. Really, the best parts were when Hal sat down to listen to the various patients of the home.
Recommended for: almost all of the battles focused on WWII, so readers who enjoy historical fiction centring on that would like this book. There is a bit of supernatural, too, so people who take to that genre will find something in this work as well.
I received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Mixed thoughts:
~I wouldn’t say this is a negative exactly, but this is not a book you can just sit down and blaze through. It makes sense! It’s about weighty material, but it will take you many encounters to finish it, if you’re like me. It’s very heavy and sobering, and the knowledge that the specific stories might not be true but that terrible incidents similar in nature DID happen will have you needing to take breaks.
~I wish there was a tiny bit more depth to the supernatural aspect. It seemed to really be dealt with at nearly the very end of the book and it might have been better if it was examined earlier.
Positive thought:
+The stories all blend together. Not a bad thing! It underscores how the horror of war is relentless and never ends. The scars are ones the veterans not only carry with them forever, but inflict outward on others who never experienced it, like how Hal was never able to get anywhere near his father. The veteran who spoke of what he found in a deserted town was probably the most horrific in a slew of atrocities.
+Even though they blend together, I felt the stories were well done. I could envision the fighting and the death and what horrid things were wrought by war. Really, the best parts were when Hal sat down to listen to the various patients of the home.
Recommended for: almost all of the battles focused on WWII, so readers who enjoy historical fiction centring on that would like this book. There is a bit of supernatural, too, so people who take to that genre will find something in this work as well.
I received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
September 27, 2026
Started out a bit confusing but quickly settled into a compelling plotline once you get to the veterans hospital. I enjoyed the introspective nature of this story. It was surprisingly moving in unexpected ways.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews