Borders

1942. The Eastern Front. The German 6th Army is surrounded at Stalingrad. 300,000 men are trapped in "the cauldron" and the Fuhrer will not countenance a retreat.

Feldmarschall Erich von Manstein, the Wehrmacht's most gifted strategist, is charged with relieving the Sixth. For Markus Hebel, a Belgian radio operator on Manstein's staff, the fate of the cauldron is personal: his son, also a radio officer, is entrenched in the city.

Manstein's rescue operation is readied - Operation Winter Storm, a lightning armoured charge across the frozen steppe - but still Hitler refuses to allow the Sixth to abandon their positions and attempt a break out. If Markus can convince his son to sabotage his equipment and free the encircled army from the F hrer's lunatic command, disaster can yet be averted.

Caught between the exhilarating dash of Manstein's desperate, gallant gambit - a latter-day Charge of the Light Brigade - and the piteous suffering of the doomed 6th Army, Borders is a story of impossible choices in a theatre of total war. Family love, national identity, even military genius, count for nothing in the face of war's own almost sentient appetites.