Melina Druga's stunning WWI trilogy follows a young nurse and her family as they navigate the challenges and heartbreak the Great War brings. Now read the entire trilogy in one volume.
Book 1: The War Front Story: Angel of Mercy
Being an idle housewife never suited Hettie Bartlette. So, when her husband, Geoffrey, decided to enlist only a couple of months after their wedding, the choice to join him was easy.
At the time, it seemed as if the tide would turn against the Germans at any moment. But once the ambitious young couple arrives in Europe, it's plain to see that the turmoil on French soil shows no indication of abating.
It isn't all bad: Hettie finds purpose tending to the wounded in the Casualty Clearing Station. Unlike people back home in Ontario, hardly anyone within the Allied forces believes her work as an army nurse to be unseemly for a married woman of Hettie's wealth and breeding.
But nothing, not even coming face-to-face with the horrific aftermath of gas and gunfire on a daily basis, can prepare Hettie for the tragedies and tribulations 1915 has in store. With letters from her family pouring in, begging her to come home, Hettie must soon decide on which side of the Atlantic she belongs.
Book 2: The Home Front Story: Those Left Behind
Newlyweds Hettie Steward and Geoffrey Bartlette wasted no time heading to the Western Front after the war began. In the wake of the couple's traumatic and untimely separation, their families begin to knit themselves together ever tighter. Matriarchs Lucretia Steward and Amelia Bartlette attempt to keep the home fires burning, unable to escape the tumult of the war.
Hettie's brother and brother-in-law join her on the front lines. Back in Ontario, some households grow. Others remain painfully stagnant. Romantic relationships wax and wane as these bright-eyed young adults fall in and out of love with one another and wrestle with the tension between timeworn traditions and the shiny appeal of progress.
As five years of deaths, births, tragedies, and triumphs unfold, one question never strays far from center: How does one maintain strong filial bonds - and repair weakened ones - when the world is changing rapidly on all sides?
Book 3: The Homecoming Story: Adjustment Year
It's been five years since Hettie left home a blushing bride. Recently relieved of her duties as an army nurse, she makes her long-awaited return a newlywed once again... and pregnant.
Hettie can't escape the painful memories of the thousands of wounded soldiers she tended to at the Casualty Clearing Station, the devastation of the Halifax Explosion, or the death of her first husband, killed in action shortly after they arrived in France. In a fragile state, she finds little in the way of acceptance or affection among her new in-laws, who can't seem to understand how a way of life that was once so familiar could become so frightening.
To make matters worse, Hettie barely knows the man whose child she's carrying. By the time the war finally came to an end - and she accepted his proposal of a hasty marriage - Col. Alfred Taylor had spent more time as her penfriend than her lover.
He's the only family she has in Niagara-on-the-Lake, but Alfred might be too caught up with his own problems to notice Hettie's ongoing battle. Both husband and wife are still fighting the ghosts of the Great War, but will they realize how similar their demons are before it's too late?
