War Story Explores the Ghosts People Carry Long After Battles End

SPIN Magazine assistant editor Charles Moss calls the book “a sweeping, haunting, historical epic that methodically pulled me in and refused to let go.”

An attorney and former professor who taught Middle East politics for more than two decades, John Amos brings an intellectual depth to popular fiction.

In John Amos’ The Call of the Bugle, a young war correspondent spends decades trying to understand the catastrophe he witnessed.

PEBBLE BEACH, CA, UNITED STATES, October 15, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Some stories refuse to stay buried. In John Amos’ The Call of the Bugle, the ghosts of war, lost love, and an unfinished past converge decades after the Charge of the Light Brigade, drawing an aging reporter back into the tragedy he witnessed as a young man.

After surviving the catastrophic charge at Balaklava when he was a young war correspondent, the reporter spends decades trying to understand what happened. Struggling with alcoholism and haunted by what he witnessed, he searches through forgotten diaries, long-hidden letters, and interviews with the daughters of the fallen, piecing together the life and death of General Robert Dryden, who appeared to be smiling as he charged the gates of hell. But his search for historical answers gradually becomes something more personal. As the past resurfaces, he is tormented by the ghost of a general who cannot rest and by the memory of a love he refuses to name.

The Call of the Bugle by author and former professor John Amos is a sweeping, multi-generational historical saga set against the stark reality of the Crimean War. It is a haunting meditation on valor and folly, memory and masculinity, and the unspoken costs of war.

Readers who love Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See or Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong will find in The Call of the Bugle the same fusion of meticulous historical research and devastating emotional truth.

SPIN Magazine assistant editor Charles Moss calls the book “a sweeping, haunting, historical epic that methodically pulled me in and refused to let go.” And Graham Watts, Officer of the Order of the British Empire, said, “The scent of gunpowder and the sense of heroism spreads through The Call of the Bugle like a sizzling fuse.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Amos, Ph.D., J.D., is the author of five novels, including the Petrie & Pettigrew series, which follows two brilliant detectives through the archaeology, intrigue, and buried secrets of Egypt, Syria, and the ancient world.

An attorney and former professor who taught Middle East politics for more than two decades, Amos brings an intellectual depth to popular fiction. He has lived in Libya and Egypt and traveled widely across the Middle East, and that immersion in culture, language, and history gives his novels authenticity. His academic publications span law, history, and Middle Eastern studies. He writes for readers who want to be entertained and to learn something true about the world.

For more information, please visit https://www.authorjohnamos.com/.

The Call of the Bugle
Publisher: Imagination Press
ISBN-13: ‎979-8950191015
Available from https://www.amazon.com/Call-Bugle-John-Amos/dp/B0H258WCV1

Trish Stevens
Ascot Media Group, Inc.
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