The Last Boat: Echoes After the War (The Quiet Soldier Series Book 2)

The Last Boat: Echoes After the War

Book Two of The Quiet Soldier Series
By D. Vincent Delorenzo

After the war, he disappeared.

Not into the earth, not into the bottle, but into the sea.

On the sun-bleached island of Ko Samet, a former U.S. Army veteran known only to a few locals begins the quiet work of salvaging a wrecked Thai junk boat from the shoreline. With calloused hands and the rhythm of salt and sweat, he rebuilds what others deemed lost — just as he attempts to rebuild himself, plank by splintered plank.

But memory is not easily buried in sand.

The Last Boat is a haunting, lyrical journey through trauma, exile, solitude, and the long shadow of war. Written in the stripped, honest style of Hemingway, with echoes of Tim O’Brien, Denis Johnson, Robert Stone, and Joseph Conrad, this is not just a novel — it is a meditation on silence, masculinity, and the tides that pull men inward.

Each chapter pulses with salt, memory, and ghost-light — fragments of the battlefield, voices from the past, and the unspoken ache of what was never said. The veteran is nameless, but not faceless. He is every soldier who came home and found the world too loud. Every man who lost a brother in battle and never found the right words to say goodbye. Every soul who searches not for glory, but for peace.

As the final boat takes shape under his hands, so too does a fragile hope — that even among broken boards and broken hearts, something might be made whole again.

The Last Boat: Echoes After the War is a literary masterwork destined to take its place alongside the great American war novels. Timeless, spare, and deeply human, this novel invites readers to sit with silence, bear witness to healing, and understand that some journeys begin only when the war ends.