Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the California Book Award
Winner of the Northern California Book Award
A Library Journal Best Book of 2020
PRESS
“A collection of stories with themes of class division, the artist’s role in society and our need for love and belonging, reflecting a prowess with language and a mastery of the short form.”―2021 Pulitzer Prize Committee

Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Nine tales of human endurance, accomplishment, and epiphany told with style and brio. Mason is one of our best historical novelists, creating panoramas of rich detail, propulsive plot, and artful character development in novels such as The Piano Tuner (2002) and The Winter Soldier (2018). In his first story collection, he shows how quickly and completely he can immerse readers in a foreign place and time. "Death of the Pugilist, or The Famous Battle of Jacob Burke & Blindman McGraw" is--if you'll forgive the wordplay--a knockout punch: 17 short, numbered rounds recounting the life of a Bristol stevedore whose fate awaits him in the ring of an 1824 boxing match so vividly described you can almost taste the blood... "The Ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace" follows an English "bug collector" and "species man" who is "entranced by life's variety" to go to the Malay Archipelago, where, burning with fever, he concocts a theory of the natural world: "Everywhere he looked he saw the struggle for existence. He could not happen upon an insect without wondering how every trait had saved it from nature's forge..." In "The Line Agent Pascal," the titular Frenchman maintains a solitary railway station deep in the Amazon rainforest, his only human connection coming, Twitter-like, with other agents along the telegraph line... An enchanting cabinet of curiosities and wonders. 

Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)
Mason’s melodious, introspective collection (after The Winter Soldier) locates startling depth in a series of engrossing character studies. In the opener, “Death of the Pugilist, or The Famous Battle of Jacob Burke & Blindman McGraw,” a thoughtful stevedore in 1820s England becomes a champion fighter (“Burke spent a good deal of time wondering... about how a hitter could be a good man”). In “The Miraculous Discovery of Psammetichus I,” a curious pharaoh conducts cruel experiments on children to solve the mysteries of human behavior. In other stories, a desperate mother strives to save her severely asthmatic son in coal-choked Victorian London, a doctor loses his very self to a strange doppelgänger, and a French telegraph operator deep in the Amazon finds a strange sort of companionship. In “The Ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace,” Mason imagines a scientist’s thoughts while he waits in vain for a reply to a letter he’s written to Darwin outlining his ideas about natural selection. The title story is a standout, rendered in the form of a madman’s ravings... compelled to obsessively catalogue every poignant piece of human existence. Mason is a brilliant wordsmith (“he looked upon the world, and what he saw was not life, but life transforming, sprouting sharper fangs and nectaries of ever sweeter nectar, taking flight as color danced kaleidoscopically across her wings”), and respectful of his readers by not giving away too much. Each story is informed and deepened by scientific inquisitiveness, and rewards readers with understated philosophical insight. This showcases Mason’s wide range and mastery of lyrical precision. 

Library Journal- (Best Short Stories 2020)
Bringing a polymath’s fascination with science, medicine, and history to an engaging range of stories, mason animates his debut collection with warmth and wonder.  This cabinet of curiosities imagines what moves a lonesome telegraph operator in the Amazon, a young English bare-knuckle fighter, a woman balloonist confronted with a tear in the firmament, a 19th century epileptic physician and more.

Booklist
Mason follows three novels, including The Winter Soldier (2018), with a collection of mind- stretching historical short stories. Each narrator is in danger or under grave stress and at odds with society. Pinpoint physical details and precisely articulated emotions collide with the mystical, while scientific quests drive characters to extremes. A mother whose son is sickened by London’s poisonous fogs finds an improbable rescue in an article about ferns. Psammetichus I of ancient Egypt conducts alarming nature versus nurture experiments with children. A French woman balloonist sees what appears to be a “rent in the heavens.” With transporting empathy and feverish intensity, Mason portrays the brilliant naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who trustingly shared his theory of evolution with Darwin. Sheer wonder shapes the title story, a poetic homage to the Brazilian self-taught artist Arthur Bispo do Rosário, who created a Registry for God out of resplendent assemblages of cast-off objects and embroideries during his 50 years in a psychiatric institution. With touches of Borges and Calvino, Mason’s fabulist stories are works of tenderness and awe for human curiosity, passion, mad valor, and profound resiliency.

The New Yorker
The characters in these robust short stories, set mostly in the nineteenth century, struggle as captains of their destinies. A doctor increasingly believes his body to be inhabited by an “imposter”; a Frenchwoman takes a hot-air balloon to new heights, hoping to find “a tear in the very fabric of the heavens.” In the only story that takes place in present-day America, the narrator remembers an uncle, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, who became a fan of Civil War reënactments and of WrestleMania—confrontations with predetermined outcomes. “I wonder whether there was something about the cartoon violence that served as a parody of all violence, and perhaps as a catharsis for the real kind that he’d seen,” the narrator writes. 

The Daily Mail (UK)
An outstanding collection of short stories from an American novelist best known for his historical fiction, this immerses the reader in various imaginatively realised moments from history while conducting a series of dazzling forays into style and form. A fight between a humble dock worker and an infamous pugilist in 1820s Bristol, with each punch and lunge bloodily detailed, builds up an almost incantatory force. A mother goes on a desperate midnight journey through 19th-century London to seek relief from a botanist for her dangerously asthmatic son. A budding scientist waits feverishly and in vain to hear from Darwin after sending him a letter detailing his own discoveries on natural selection. In the Edgar Allan Poe-esque The Second Doctor Service, a man is driven half mad by the belief his doppelganger is trying to take over his body and soul. The language combines featherweight grace with immense muscle across a collection that contains not one dud.

The Christian Science Monitor
This collection of nine stories captures characters in the midst of remarkable experiences: a hot air balloonist investigating the upper atmosphere, a French telegraph operator discovering companionship deep in the Amazon, a bug collector corresponding with Charles Darwin.  Daniel Mason conveys more in a short story than many authors manage in an entire novel.

The Guardian (UK)
From the street fighter set up for a fall to a balloonist who encounters a hole in the sky, these short stories offer the nutrition of a novel at a tenth of the length... The grand pleasures of fiction are all here: rich, cushioning detail; vivid characters delivering decisive action; and a sense of escape into a larger world. The best story of all, though, might be one of interior drama. “The Second Doctor Service” is a tale of possession that stands comparison with Maupassant’s terrifying “The Horla”, and reminds us that before we face our foes, first we must battle ourselves.

San Francisco Chronicle
These stories are some of the most unique and beguiling I’ve read in quite some time. A perfect and fitting pick for these seemingly endless days when science, our understanding of reality and a faint longing for human connection are so irrevocably intertwined.

Financial Times
Packed with the exotic, quixotic, grotesque and transcendent, these tales are played out in a series of pungent historical settings. Equally intense is the knot of psychological oddities they present: Mason’s characters are tangled up in delusions, neuroses and absurd passions... Even though freighted with the influence of Conrad, Greene and Maugham, these literary journeys retain a distinctly American irreverence, with Mason producing playful riffs rather than straight-faced pastiches. And in spite of an overwhelming sense of an author having fun, they deliver poignant results too. 

"What I've found most remarkable about Mason's fiction is the quality of his revelations, his ability to unveil temperaments, habits, natures. His stories are mysteries, albeit not in the genre sense... In all of the stories, you can see Mason figuring out new strategies to get closer to the people he is writing about. Each is a portrait, each a deep dive into an individual's nature, each rooted in history." Wyatt Mason, New York Times Magazine

"Daniel Mason is a masterful storyteller, and these stories— the attention to history and science and all that is unknown-- are nothing short of brilliant. With exquisite, mesmerizing language, he transports us to places far beyond the realm of our realities and then lands us in ways wholly intimate and moving. A Registry Of My Passage Upon the Earth is a marvel and a journey not to be missed."    Jill McCorkle, author of Life After Life

"I've given up picking perfect sentences to read aloud and am now just reciting the entire book. The talent of Daniel Mason - using words in this way is witchcraft, surely." Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory
PRESS
"Part mystery, part war story, part romance, The Winter Soldier is a dream of a novel -- impeccably researched and totally immersive. The unsinkable Margarete is a mesmerizing character, and the book's investigation into the psychiatric toll of war on its combatants could not be more timely. This novel convinces you with every sentence."
―Anthony Doerr, author of New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See

"I have been a Daniel Mason fan since The Piano Tuner. His abilities as a storyteller and a writer of the most gorgeous prose leave you wanting more. The Winter Soldier is a tour de force. I was immersed in the grandeur of Imperial Vienna and the frozen battlefields of the Eastern Front, and in this beautiful tale of love and war, and of our frailty and resilience in the face of both."
―Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone

"So real, so rich and detailed, that the room in which I was reading vanished. I was transported to a lost world of the past. Suspenseful, thrilling, aching with emotion. Living with Lucius and Margarete, it was the First World War as I have never felt it."
―Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less

‘The Winter Soldier held me by the throat from the first lyrical page to the last. A story which manages to be as original as it is timeless, and above all, credible."
—Emma Donoghue, author of the national bestseller Room

"In the tradition of Cold Mountain and Doctor Zhivago, Daniel Mason's new novel is a gloriously gripping story of love, war, and the marvel of human endurance. Sweeping yet intimate, brutal yet tender, it kept me up, it broke my heart, and it made me remember yet again just how a good book -- a really good book -- rekindles our love of life."
​―Julia Glass, author of A House Among the Trees and National Book Award-winning Three Junes

"The Winter Soldier brings to vivid life the World War I story of a medical student who is taught battlefield surgery by a young nun with a mysterious past. Enthralled by the setting, the characters, and the language, I was held captive by this remarkable historical novel."
―Mark Sullivan, bestselling author of Beneath a Scarlet Sky

“In Winter Soldier, Mason achieves a deeply affecting balancing act, drawing us into the crushing agony of war while simultaneously stirring our hearts with an inspired and touching love story.”  
—Georgia Hunter, bestselling author of We Were the Lucky Ones

​“Daniel Mason, a 42-year old practicing psychiatrist, has quietly emerged as one of the finest prose stylists in American fiction—bringing a clinician's mind to the construction of interior worlds.”  The New York Times Magazine

"The Winter Soldier brims with improbable narrative pleasures. Mason is a practitioner of storytelling backhandedly praised as “old-fashioned.” In fact, it’s timeless. These pages crackle with excitement — and charging cavalries, false identities, arranged marriages, scheming industrialists and missing persons. Enemy philatelists rendezvous in no-man’s land to trade stamps while Viennese children play in model trenches. Within the meticulously researched and magnificently realized backdrop of European dissolution, Mason finds his few lost souls, and shepherds them toward an elusive peace.
Lucius’ “dream of being able to see another person’s thinking” is not only the controlling metaphor of “The Winter Soldier,” but the work of literature more broadly. Lucius may fail, but the novel he carries is a spectacular success."  Anthony Marra, The New York Times Book Review

"What I’ve found most remarkable about Mason’s fiction is the quality of his revelations, his ability to unveil temperaments, habits, natures. His stories are mysteries, albeit not in the genre sense: When you come to the end of a Mason story, an explanation or solution to the puzzle of a person doesn’t punctually arrive. The unknown remains unknown; the unexplainable remains unexplained. There is, instead, an intense quality of revelation — a mystical intensity — of the sort described by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: 'There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.'"
Wyatt Mason, The New York Times Magazine

​"A great war novel, plunging you into the chaos of conflict and the unexpected consequences of love that begins amid that chaos."  Lynn Neary, NPR

“Daniel Mason has harnessed the harsh clarity of winter to frame his urgent, cinematically beautiful third novel, “The Winter Soldier,” which, like its predecessors (“The Piano Tuner,” “A Far Country”), fully qualifies as epic… I’ll go very gently now on plot summary, but not on admiration. Not only does Mason make every crumb of pertinent history, culture and geography so real throughout this saga that a reader feels instantly teleported into all of it: “The Winter Soldier” delivers, in shocking detail, a relentless inventory of the era’s medical knowledge and practices… One is reminded of a dozen greats: “Dr. Zhivago,” “The English Patient,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The novel’s pacing clips along tightly; its closure, when at last it comes, proves deeply, memorably moving… Writers are, first and last, noticers. Mason has created a magnificent world, urging us to savor every grain of it — right down to the memory of “the way that snow collected in the seams” of a worn rucksack. Such passionate noticing is among reading’s finest rewards. It’s to Mason’s abiding credit that he adheres to the letter of Henry James’ beloved dictum — to be “someone on whom nothing is lost.”
Joan Frank, San Francisco Chronicle

“The beauty of Daniel Mason’s new novel, “The Winter Soldier,” persists even through scenes of unspeakable agony. That tension reflects the span of his talent. As a writer, Mason knows how to capture the grace of a moment; as a doctor, he knows how wrong things can go… As Mason showed in his previous novels, “The Piano Tuner” and “The Far Country,” he’s extraordinarily good at conjuring up journeys into unfamiliar places… Lucius’s error is just a slight misapplication of empathy, an inconsequential footnote in the annals of WWI disasters, but in Mason’s careful telling, the trajectories of lives are determined by such decisions. “The Winter Soldier” draws us into the deadly undertow of history that swept away so many in the early 20th century. The redemption the story ultimately offers is equally unlikely and gorgeous, painfully limited but gratefully received in a world thrown into chaos.”
Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“When an artfully written historical novel comes along … it comes as a welcome relief. You can let down your guard and simply enjoy this unfashionable genre in the hands of a master writer. That's how I felt from the very first pages of Daniel Mason’s new novel, ‘The Winter Soldier,’ a captivating story… early passages describing the hospital, its various characters and the education that Lucius receives there — both medical and romantic — are among the many marvels [of the book]… [‘The Winter Soldier’] does what all the best novels do: Creates a world in which readers pleasurably lose themselves.”
Tom Beer, Newsday
 
“A remarkable example of how a skilled writer can turn a dusty premise into a story bursting with vivid life. There is nothing romanticized about Lucius and Margarethe’s work; the lice and frigid cold and unthinkable injuries (the squeamish will need frequent pauses) are rendered with meticulous art. It’s less a story of love than a story of pain, of how war pinches one’s emotions in a grip, of how the human brain processes glimpses of hell. Mason’s prose, however, flows like clear water, leaving us moved by these star-crossed lovers, and by the soldiers ‘who seemed forever stuck in their eternal winters.’”
Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times