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Book Summary and Reviews of Hold Strong by Robert Dugoni

Hold Strong by Robert Dugoni

Hold Strong

A Novel

by Robert Dugoni

  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • Published:
  • Jan 2025, 555 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From Robert Dugoni, Jeff Langholz, and Chris Crabtree comes an epic and inspiring novel―based on true events―about love, heroism, and resilience during the darkest chapters of World War II.

Sam Carlson is a projectionist in small-town Minnesota, where fantasies unspool in glorious black and white―for him and for his sweetheart, college-bound math whiz Sarah Haber. When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Sam is sent to the Philippines and captured as a POW. Brutalized but unbroken by the Bataan Death March and POW camps, Sam is one of eighteen hundred starved and weakened prisoners herded into the cargo hold of a barbaric hell ship called the Arisan Maru, his survival doubtful.

Determined to use her math skills on the home front, Sarah is recruited to Washington, DC, into the covert field of code breaking. When Sarah intercepts a message about a Japanese convoy, the US Navy's mission is clear: sink the Arisan Maru and send it to the bottom of the South China Sea. Now, the lives of the two young lovers are about to inadvertently collide in one of the most shocking acts of World War II.

Anchored in an extraordinary true story and breathlessly re-created, Hold Strong is a one-of-a-kind novel that explores faith, courage, survival, and coming home against insurmountable odds.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Though these gruesome aspects of war aren't often easy to portray in novels and historical fiction, Hold Strong, by the trio of researchers and writers Robert Dugoni, Jeff Langholz, and Chris Crabtree, has achieved the unachievable. It does so with their cast of strong characters backed by their meticulous research." ―The Epoch Times

"Something straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, with submarines and secret codes and war-altering decisions made at heavy cost. It's thrilling stuff, made all the more so by its grounding in history." ―Associated Press

This information about Hold Strong was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Robert Dugoni

Robert Dugoni is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Amazon Charts bestselling author of the Tracy Crosswhite series; the Charles Jenkins series; the David Sloane series; several standalone novels, including A Killing on the Hill, The World Played Chess, and The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell; and coauthor of the nonfiction exposé The Cyanide Canary, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Dugoni is the recipient of the Nancy Pearl Book Award for fiction, a multi-time winner of the Friends of Mystery Spotted Owl Award for best novel set in the Pacific Northwest, and a finalist for many other awards. His books are sold in more than twenty-five countries, have been translated into more than thirty languages, and have reached millions of readers worldwide. For more information, visit robertdugonibooks.com.

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