Burma, 1942. Margot Selwyn has managed the fear for two years - the boot checked every morning before her hand goes into it, the ward's rhythms worked into her hands until they no longer require thought. Then Rangoon falls, and the managing becomes something else: a retreat on foot ahead of an advancing army, a hospital rebuilt three times in three different camps, and a silence, when it finally comes, that she will spend two years learning to carry.
Daniel Pryce learns to send Morse the way his instructor promises the good operators do - clean, not fast, the shape of a letter becoming simply a shape his hand knows without thinking. He walks a hundred miles of the retreat's worst road to reach the training that will make him useful, and is dropped, eventually, into the hills above the Irrawaddy to keep a wireless schedule that a great many things could interrupt, and one day, without warning, does.
The Wireless and the Mountain moves between Margot's ward and Daniel's wireless set across the length of the Burma campaign - through the fall of Rangoon, the long retreat north, the silence of a missed schedule, and the siege that finally brings them into the same place at the same time. It is a novel about the discipline that gets people through what they cannot control: the four-count before the fear passes, the correct rhythm at the key, the letter written home that says less than it means. And it is a novel about what grows, almost against its own will, in the space that discipline leaves over.
Grounded in the real history of the Burma campaign, military nursing, and the wireless operators of Force 136 and the OSS, The Wireless and the Mountain is for readers who want their wartime romance to have earned its quiet moments - in the tradition of The Nightingale, All the Light We Cannot See, and The Alice Network.
