ROGUE ETHOZ

She has spent nine years being needed. He has spent four years expecting to die. They have one winter.
November 1918. In a shell crater in the Argonne, Sergeant Khalifa Jones, forty-five, Canadian, four years in the line, watches his pocket watch stop at twenty minutes to six. Then the sky stops with it.

He wakes in the year 2184, in the middle of a raid, in the square of a walled village that should not exist.
Vellaine is four hundred people on a ridge above a black marsh, held together by stone, grain and one woman. Antoinette Marchetti-Vale is sixty, widowed, and the commander of the walls. The Harrow, a deserter army that keeps children as labour and the hearts of the dead in jars, has taken her son. Their leader wants the strange engine buried beneath her chapel. And Antoinette is hiding something she has told no one: her heart is failing.

She doesn't trust the soldier in the foreign uniform. Then she learns why he is here. The engine carries travellers through the mind of whoever is closest to death, and Khalifa came through hers. Every day he stays, she is paying for it.
With a talking cat, a tinker who appears and vanishes and carries Khalifa's stopped watch, an unsolved drowning in a cistern locked from the inside, and a traitor at the gate, Vellaine has until the first snow to hold. And Khalifa will have to choose between the family he has already lost and the woman he can only keep by letting her die.

For readers who want the war to matter and the love story to hurt, Rogue Ethoz is a sweeping, bittersweet, closed-door science fiction romance about a soldier out of time and the woman who learns she can be wanted as well as needed.