Winner of the 2016 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award for Best New Voice: Fiction

Ames Sheldon Eleanors Wars Cover

It’s 1942 and the globe is aflame. Eleanor Sutton, matriarch of a prosperous New Jersey family, struggles to fight the war on the home front. But then long-buried memories rooted in Eleanor’s service in the Great War come to light. These decades-old secrets threaten her marriage to George—and bring his own carefully guarded secrets to the surface. As the tranquility of the Sutton household is upended, son Edward escapes to the front lines. Younger brother Nat, an aspiring musician, wrestles with the shocking revelations while trying to find his way at boarding school at Andover. Setting her own future aside to oversee the family Victory farm, daughter Harriet faces the secrets that challenge all her assumptions about family and love.

Set against the historical backdrop of World War II, Eleanor’s Wars chronicles the personal battles of one heroic woman in a rapidly changing world. It explores a timeless, universal subject: the insidious power of family secrets to shape and destroy lives and alter individual destinies.

"A warm and intimate portrait of an American family twisted and shaped by the two world wars… a pleasure to read.”
—Mary Logue, Lake of Tears

Available from Itasca Books and Amazon.