Burden of Memory - Tapa dura

Novels about military nurses are relatively rare. This one is more so, because it's a story about a World War II Canadian military nurse - written within the reticulum of an upper-class Ontario family. Delany's military nurse, Moira, now in her eighties, engages a professional journalist to write her memoirs, and tells the journalist, ""I want this to be a story ofthe life of one Canadian woman,"" adding, ""it's hard to get women's stories told and once told, heard....""Not only is this a fascinating mystery, but to use Noah Richter's phrase, Delany gives the reader a real ""sense of Canadian place...""But in this historical fiction, there is another ""sense of place"" given: the feeling of being a Canadian military nurse in the UK and some parts of Europe during WW II. Chapters about those experiences and two years of post-war nursing in England are interwoven with those of decades oflife at the cottage...the mystery of the ""burden"" carried by this WW II nurse makes for utterly fascinating reading.--Shirley Stinson, Canadian Association for the History of Nursing Newsletter (Fall 2006)

Elaine Benson, a successful novelist who let love in the person of an unreliable screenwriter jettison her career, is now divorced, broke, and come to a ""primitive, untamed northern forest"" on Lake Muskoka to interview for a job. Elderly Miss Moira Madison of the fabulously rich Canadian family wishes to write her memoirs.Miss Madison isn't interested in a bestseller. She wants to leave a record of her life and most specifically of her years with the Canadian Army Nursing Sisters of World War II. Her service in the British and then European theater was filled with triumphs and bitter losses and forever shaped her life. Can Elaine tell her story working with decades of old documents?Settling into the family ""cottage"" and what remains of a lifestyle long gone, Elaine reconnects with her love of researching the past. But somehow her project--she soon discovers the first writer hired oddly drowned in the Lake--stirs someone to murder. . . .