The Call of the Bugle

"A truly unforgettable read." -Cheryl Wills, Emmy Award-winning journalist

Love survives the valley of death. In ten minutes, the Light Brigade was destroyed. In a lifetime, one man could never forget why. He rode into the Valley of Death. He came home haunted by what he saw-and by what he lost.

1854. A war correspondent witnesses the catastrophic Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava-six hundred cavalry riding straight into Russian guns. He survives. The question that haunts him: why did they ride? Years later, aging and aching, he sets out to uncover the truth-interviewing the daughters of the fallen, piecing together forgotten diaries, and following a trail of duty, ego, and heartbreak. But as the past rises to meet him, so does something else: the ghost of a general who cannot rest, and the memory of a love the correspondent himself refuses to name.

Part war epic, part love story, part ghost tale, The Call of the Bugle is a meditation on valor and folly, on aging and memory, and on the people we carry with us long after they are gone.

If Tennyson gave you the thunder of the charge, Amos gives you the heartbreak.

Readers who loved Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See or Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong will find in The Call of the Bugle the same rare alchemy: meticulous historical research fused with devastating emotional truth. John Amos writes war the way it really is-not glorious, but human. The battle scenes grip. The love story aches. The ghost unsettles. And the final bugle call lands like a promise.