Dare Not Tell
Elaine Aucoin Schroller
Genre: Historical fiction
Joe Parker, an Australian WWI veteran who thinks he has tamed all his demons and his American wife, Sophie, a wartime nurse who thinks she knows all his secrets, must confront their shared past in a story of love, loss, and redemption from WWI France to Australia and France on the threshold of WWII.
July 1939. Twenty years after he left the World War I battlefields of France and Belgium, Australian Joe Parker thinks he has tamed all his demons. His American wife Sophie, a wartime nurse, thinks she knows all his secrets.
He hasn’t. She doesn’t.
The Parkers are looking forward to a long-delayed honeymoon in France before they sail home to Sydney. But visiting a site where Joe fought wreaks havoc with their itinerary and their marriage.
When they arrive at Villers-Bretonneux, the location of Joe’s most brutal battle, his long-buried memories erupt, including the ones he never told Sophie. And an impromptu trip to the French Alps only makes things worse when they discover German war artifacts on pristine alpine trails and the walls of the miles-deep Chamonix valley close in on Joe like the deepest trench he ever experienced. All the defenses he uses to hold his memories at bay start crumbling as the world teeters on the brink of a second world war.
Bonds of friendship and shared experience helped them endure the Great War, but Sophie begins to doubt how well she really knows her husband when the foundations of their relationship seem to shift out of control. Can their marriage survive this trip? Or will Joe’s need to keep his secrets break both their hearts?
