Diligent River Daughter by Bruce Graham

Diligent River Daughter

Bruce Graham

Novel
$19.95
224 pages
5 1/2" x 8 1/2" Trade Paperback
ISBN 978-1-897426-23-4
(Available in March 2011)

Order this book from: Nimbus Publishing (or 1-800-Nimbus9)
or Amazon or Chapters or Pottersfield Press mail order.

In 1914 when Canada is swept into the Great War, Charlene Durant is already a veteran of loneliness and heartbreak, yet her indomitable spirit and belief in her own intelligence keep her from sinking into despair.


There is nothing normal about her life. A mother's death is not unusual in the time of widespread epidemics and neither is the quarantine imposed on the shattered remnants of her family. But becoming her father's assistant as a young girl and travelling the dusty roads of Nova Scotia as he sells tombstones to the recently bereaved is an unorthodox education. After almost going mad with grief at his wife's death, her father has become an aging Lothario, unpredictable and miserable when the army repeatedly refuses to enlist him. But finally, by 1916 with thousands dead on the battlefields, he becomes a soldier and goes to Europe to fight.


Hurt and angry over her father's decision to desert her, Charlene takes her unstable Aunt Matilda and leaves for Boston, where she lies about her age to get a job in a newspaper. She falls in love with a youthful crime reporter and befriends an old Irish sea dog who takes her into the midst of a kidnapping and murder.


Charlene brushes against the great events of her time: the Titanic sinking, the Halifax Explosion, the suffragette movement, and the struggle of a young woman to be accepted into the man's world of newspaper work. Overshadowing all is the war that changes the world and everyone in it. Diligent River Daughter is the story of how a brave and strong-willed young woman from the Parrsboro Shore fights for her independence and identity in a most troubled time.




Bruce Graham is a Nova Scotia writer and former broadcaster, who for many years was the face of the evening TV news in Maritime homes. Bruce and his wife Helen live in their hometown of Parrsboro. Diligent River Daughter is his fifth book. The Ship's Company Theatre adapted two of his previous novels—The Parrsboro Boxing Club and Ivor Johnson's Neighbours, both published by Pottersfield—for the stage.


Bruce Graham is also the author of: Anchorman, Parrsboro Boxing Club, Dream of the Dove, and Ivor Johnson's Neighbours.