Jessica Hines’s *My Brother’s War*, published by Dewi Lewis in 2021, is a book about a sister’s search for a brother she could not save. Gary Hines returned from Vietnam and died by his own hand ten years later. The 184-page hardback, containing ninety colour photographs and forty letters, begins where family history usually stalls: in a small box of effects. Letters, snapshots and personal objects became Hines’s guides as she travelled to Vietnam twice, attended a reunion of Gary’s comrades, telephoned army friends decades after the war, and visited the house where he died. Along the way she found handwritten declarations of love from his Vietnamese fiancée, opening a story that the family had not known.

Hines uses Gary’s own photographs as points of departure. By working with shadows, magnification and reflections, she photographs what can no longer be photographed directly, constructing an illusion of memory rather than a documentary record of a place. The book thus moves between two kinds of image: the soldier’s own pictures, which show the landscapes that shaped his trauma, and the photographer’s responses, which acknowledge the limits of recovering another person’s experience. The inclusion of letters alongside photographs gives the sequence a documentary backbone without pretending to completeness.

The subject reaches past one family. *My Brother’s War* concerns loss, grief and survival in the aftermath of conflict, and its account of Post Traumatic Stress and its consequences speaks to the many households, in the United States and elsewhere, that have absorbed the return of a veteran and then the cost of that return. Dewi Lewis Publishing issued the work with support from the Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Arts Foundation. A book that treats a private archive with this much care, and that sets a soldier’s photographs beside a sibling’s reckoning with them, is worth the attention of readers who follow photography’s role in family memory and in the long record of war.