Let Us Be True

Finalist, Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction andEileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book,2016 Manitoba Book AwardsFrom the killing fields of Europe to the merciless beauty of the Canadian prairies, Let Us Be True tells the story of three women whose lives have been shaped and damaged by secrets-their own and those that stretch back through time, casting their shadow from one generation to the next.Pearl Calder, a woman in her seventies, has thrown away her past and kept it a secret from her daughters. But as Pearl confronts her own mortality, she begins to understand what her dead husband, Henry, has always known: Secrets are like dark and angry ghosts. And they don't just haunt you. They haunt everyone you love.With a life that spans the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the deep conservatism of the postwar boom, Pearl's secrets are rooted in events over which she had no control: the death of her mother; a father destroyed by war; a brother who adores her but who dies on the beaches of Dieppe, and a sister who abandons Pearl to save herself. Alternating between the past and present, and between Pearl's voice and those of her family members, both living and dead, Let Us Be True explores how all of our lives, to a greater or lesser degree, are shaped by secrets: our own as well as ancestral secrets we may know nothing about, but which affect who we are and who we become.