Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Zilla: Brent van Staalduinen’s powerful novel The Peace Thieves is a tumultuous read, and we knew we had to have him here to tell us about it. So Brent, can you introduce us to your book?

Brent: The Peace Thieves is a sweeping novel of conflict and loss amidst a desperate civil war, and the long, fraught years that follow.

Francis, a reserve army medic, deploys to Croatia in the spring of 1993 and quickly discovers that peacekeeping isn’t the easy duty he volunteered for. All he can do is observe the country tear itself apart—there’s simply no peace to keep—and endure months of stress, danger, and hopeless inaction. 

Thirty years later, Viva drives halfway across the country to meet Francis, the father whose identity her mother kept secret until her deathbed. However, the Francis she meets isn’t the callous jerk she always imagined, but merely a heartbroken, troubled man holding his life together with frayed, borrowed threads. Who probably needs her help, though he’ll never ask.

Spanning decades, generations, and oceans, Francis and Viva’s alternating narratives delve into the secrets we hold, the hurts we try to hide, and the human bonds that sustain us.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Brent: Like Francis, my main character, I was a reserve army medic in the early 1990s, during a time when Canada’s reputation as a peacekeeping nation was in tatters. Though I was on the UN duty list, I resigned from the army to focus on my studies, so I’ve long wondered what my life would look like if I’d deployed, and the novel is in part an answer to that question. The Peace Thieves is also an imperfect pastiche and honouring of the stories that were given to me by friends who did deploy to places like Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, and eventually Afghanistan, and who were forever changed. Finally, it’s an anti-war novel—we can never fully predict the full cost of going to war, either for our own people or those in the countries we say we’re trying to help.

Zilla: What would it be like to meet your characters?

Brent: Francis would tell me that although I’ve long wondered how things would be now if I deployed, he’d tell me that every life serves its own purpose and that I’ve ended up precisely where I’m supposed to be. Viva would say that standing up for what’s right in the world is incredibly important, even at great personal cost. She’d also tell me to give myself more grace, and to look for the goodness in everyone. Lorina would sigh and encourage me to make publicly known the folly of standing between armies that have no desire for peace, and that civilians and the marginalized/vulnerable always bear war’s greatest cost. Finally, Mackey would swear and shout a lot of nonsense, but amidst the slop there’d be jewels to discover. 

Zilla: Do you surprise your readers?

Brent: Somehow, yes, and hearing that something in my books surprises and pleases my readers is one of my greatest writerly joys.

Zilla: Why do you write?

Brent: I believe everyone who has a gift should use it to make the world better and a little more beautiful—that is what gets me in my chair and crunching words together most mornings. Also, if I didn’t write, the words would build in my brain-parts until my head exploded.

Zilla: Who did you imagine reading your book as you wrote it?

Brent: I love imagining a reader cracking open The Peace Thieves and being drawn in by my opening two sentences: “We arrive on a grey, filthy day in spring. The war doesn’t care.” 

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Brent: I’m writing a novel inspired by my grandfather’s activities with the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in WW2, centred on a broken character who is reluctantly drawn in to doing incredibly painful and difficult things with the resistance. My grandfather didn’t talk much about the war, but I knew I had the kernel of a story when I encountered the following words he wrote to my father about his resistance days: “Of course, this was all night work.” 

Zilla: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Brent: On my website, Facebook, Instagram and Bluesky.