For this reviewer who has spent years savoring her favorite novel "The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and comparing many new historical literary novels to that one, to find another one which resonates so much with the soul and mind as this one, and for it to have a similar title (The Shadow of the Mole) is simply astounding.

First and foremost, this story is a work of sheer genius... a work of art... alive and breathing the most beautiful and gut-wrenching prose.

In summary, the story is set in 1916 WWI in the trenches of Bois de Bolante, France; a mysterious catatonic man is discovered while trench diggers excavate tunnels beneath the lines of the German army. After he is taken to the field doctor, Michel Denis, and named "The Mole," the doctor and a nurse, Marie, are sucked into the mystery of this man. Denis, formerly trained in the psychiatric field, loosely diagnoses the man with shell shock and attempts to get to the bottom of the man's hidden identity and story.

A story within a story emerges when the doctor gives The Mole a notebook, to which he starts to write in an almost otherworldly automatic recitation on the pages... his story... or is it his story? Denis becomes obsessed with the man's story, a tangled and psychological thriller about a man named Alain searching for a gypsy girl with a diamond in her belly button, a girl who changed his life in just one meeting. In the story, Alain reveals the sordid and corrupt underbelly of Paris during the Belle Epoque era – a time when philosophy, art, absinthe, and the new discovers in psychiatric treatments (Freud) bubbled to the surface in a cacophony of hazy putridness. The comparison between the horrors of the war, fighting in the trenches, and the decay of the city before the war, as well as a person's mind, is beyond compare in the way the author reveals the mystery.

Yet, Denis struggles with his own problems after losing his arm in an explosion, which eventually sends him to a different post at a mental hospital, still serving as a doctor and supervising the man known as the Mole, and leaving behind the one person who understood him better than he realized – the nurse, Marie. While at the hospital, his friendship with the director, Ferrand, gradually reveals more about the patient's history, as well as the secrets hidden in Denis's mind.

The culmination of the Mole's identity, the letters from Marie about her fate, and Denis's obsession with horses come to a stark and shattering psychological conclusion, one which will stay with the reader well into the dark night. For this reviewer, it was not possible to put this book aside to get one wink of sleep until every single word was absorbed.

While many who are avid historical fiction readers might be inclined to more light genre-typical reads, this one, this meaty thought-provoking literary novel is one for the ages, a classic in the making and will go on the shelf right next to my beloved copy of 'The Shadow of the Wind".

As a trigger warning, this is not for the faint-hearted as the descriptions of war, the shell-shocked rages of the mind trying to deal with the brutalities, the harsh connections of Freud's psycho-sexual analysis on patients, the searing flashbacks, the references to age-old philosophers and poets, as well as the traumas suffered in early childhood, play out with such authenticity as to bring tears to the eyes on more than one occasion.

A brilliant offering of astounding historical literature with themes such as the survival of the human spirit in the face of hopelessness and ultimate love within the ugly chaos of war and disfigurement of the mind and body.