The Pied Piper's poison - Christopher Wallace

Pungent tales of World War Two converge with more distant memories of the Thirty Years War in this powerful, compelling debut novel.

The year is 1946. The war is over. A young British army doctor finds himself ordered to investigate a curious plague in a Polish refugee camp. What he finds there is deeply unsettling and harrowing.

Meanwhile, a colleague is much more concerned with unravelling uncannily similar events three hundred years old, events twisted by the centuries into their current, misshapen form, as the fairy-story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Set in the Borderlands between Germany and Poland, this powerful first novel is reminiscent in mood, complexity and accomplishment of Pat Barker's World War One trilogy or Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong.