Something True

A. J. B. Johnston is an award-winning Canadian historian and novelist. For his books on French colonial history in Atlantic Canada, France made him a chevalier of its Ordre des Palmes Acad?miques. His three Thomas Pichon Novels explore ambition, longing and betrayal in 18th-century France and England. His YA novel The Hat is a 21st-century re-interpretation of the Acadian Deportation. His website is ajbjohnston.com. He is on Facebook at A J B Johnston, Writer. Something True We do not all grow up with a clear idea of who we might become. It usually takes life experiences to figure it out. Katharine is the youngest child in a prominent family on Cape Breton Island at the turn of the 20th century. While her older siblings move easily into adult roles, Katharine does not. She is shy and unable to figure out what to do with her life. She wants something that feels "true" to her, but has no idea what that is. All she knows is that becoming someone's wife--the most obvious choice in the early 1900s--holds no appeal. Then come personal tragedies and the First World War. Katharine's need to find something meaningful is magnified. She wants to go overseas to help the Allied troops, but her father refuses. Katharine has to find the inner strength to simply insist. Something True is an inspiring, coming-of-age novel that puts the reader into late 19th- and early 20th-century Cape Breton Island and into France in the midst of the First World War.