GRAVEL IS GETTING A FACELIFT AND WILL BE RE-RELEASED IN 2020

After leaving his foxhole to check on his friends in the middle of an artillery barrage during the Battle of the Bulge, Felix Carpren, a tenacious young corporal in the 101st Airborne, goes missing in action. Seven months later, a package containing the soldier’s wartime journal and an anonymous letter stating the date of his death and the location of his grave arrives on his wife Lucy’s doorstep.

With the information hidden away in the garage of the family home, the question of Felix’s death remains unanswered for almost sixty years. For Felix’s grandson Luther, a lifetime of tiptoeing around the subject resolves him to put an end to the mystery. Luther dusts off the journal and buys a ticket to Germany, determined to find Felix’s grave and discover why his grandfather never came home from the war.

When Luther arrives at a cozy inn outside the small town of Landshut, Germany, he expects a quick read and a comfortable stay. But he soon discovers that Felix’s cause of death did not die with him in 1945, and that he and his grandfather share more than a name.

In the waning days of World War II, as Hitler sends young boys to fight on the front lines and the Allies prepare to invade France, an ailing mother tasks her two sons with escaping Nazi-occupied Europe before it’s too late. Her youngest, Jürgen, is fourteen years old and has never seen combat. His brother, Sebastian—ten years his senior and recently invalided back to Berlin—has spent all of the years of the war on the Eastern front with the Einsatzgruppen, Hitler’s most ruthless death squads.

All but strangers, Sebastian and Jürgen flee home, headed for Normandy—the week before D-Day. As their father pursues them across Germany, and the horrific truths of Sebastian’s service emerge, two brothers are forced to grapple with the realization that war is more than what is fought on the front lines.