“A deeply emotional, haunting story about the secrets buried during wartime and the heartbreaking lessons that follow, A Sense of Things Beyond explores how to face the past once more, how to bring those secrets into the light, then how to live again.”

–Genevieve Graham, bestselling author of Bluebird and The Secret Keeper

“In this poignant novel, Renée Belliveau challenges us to have compassion for our enemy. To reconsider how the vanquished are punished. And above all, to question the rhetoric that glosses over the carnage that is war. Through the eyes of a front-line nurse and a man interned in a civilian detention camp outside Berlin during the First World War, Belliveau recounts not only the brutal experiences of those who took up arms, but of those they left behind—the millions who were witnesses to the inhumanity of war. And yet, somehow, in this novel, we are in gentle hands. This is a story that is tender, hopeful, and eminently eye-opening.”

–Christine Higdon, author of Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue

“Echoing the unimaginable loss of a generation in Vera Brittain’s epic WWI memoir, Testament of Youth, Belliveau’s compelling and poignant A Sense of Things Beyond takes aim at the hypocrisy of the Imperial war machine and highlights the oft overlooked efforts of women who laboured under horrific battlefield conditions only to return to a life that sought to erase their efforts. Shifting in timelines from bucolic beachcombing in Nova Scotia to festering, overcrowded field hospitals, to an alien detention camp in Berlin, Belliveau’s characters deftly exist in a kind of half-life, burdened by the secrets they hold, searching for a balm for hidden wounds. Redemptive, profound, and gorgeously crafted.”

—Stephens Gerard Malone, author of Jumbo and The History of Rain

“Renée Belliveau illuminates the dark corners of history to reveal lesser known perspectives from the First World War. In the aftermath of all those awful battles, whose stories get remembered, and whose fade into oblivion? Can some type of deeper healing come from remembering the forgotten, and recognizing that war is never glorious? In questioning the myths we’ve been told about this transformative period, A Sense of Things Beyond tackles hard topics, but also unfolds as a tender love story about two people grappling with war’s intangible wounds.”

–Kristen den Hartog, author of The Roosting Box: Rebuilding the Body After the First World War