What Is Written on the Tongue: A Novel

Written by Anne Lazurko

Narrated by Alex Parra

For readers of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a transportive historical novel about finding morality in the throes of war and colonization

Released from Nazi forced labor as World War II ends, 20-year-old Sam is quickly drafted and sent to the island of Java to help regain control of the colony. But the Indonesian independence movement is far ahead of the Dutch, and Sam is thrown into a guerilla war, his loyalties challenged when his squad commits atrocities reminiscent of those he suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Sam falls in love with both Sari and the beautiful island she calls home, but as he loses friends to sniper fire and jungle malady, he also loses sight of what he wants most — to be a good man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: May 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781773059792

Anne Lazurko

Anne Lazurko, a graduate of the Humber Creative Writing Program, has had short fiction and poetry published in literary magazines and anthologies and is active in the prairie writing community as mentor, editor, and teacher. Dollybird, her first novel, originally published by Coteau Books, received the Willa Award for Historical Fiction and was shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Awards Fiction Award. Her second novel, What is Written on the Tongue, was released in the spring of 2022 by ECW Press and was shortlisted for the 2022 Glengarry Book Award. She writes from her farm near Weyburn, Saskatchewan.