Dave Mason’s new novel EO-N won the Tyler R. Tichelaar Award for Best Historical Fiction at this year’s Reader Views Literary Awards. It also won the Gold Award for Historical Fiction and the Silver Award in the Mystery/Thriller category. With that kind of attention, you know it has to be good, and I’m happy to say it doesn’t disappoint.
The novel begins when a boy and his dog discover a strange piece of metal in a Norwegian glacier. This discovery soon raises questions about how it ended up in such an unlikely place.
Here Alison Wiley enters the story. Alison, a thirty-four-year-old biotech CEO, was my favorite character in the book, probably because she, like many of us, is searching for that deeper purpose that will give her life meaning. You began your career wanting to help people, but now find that your time is spent less on life-changing research and more on board meetings and trying to please shareholders, and this, along with a series of losses has left her with many questions about the meaning of life and her own purpose.
When Alison is informed that the wreckage of the plane flown by her late grandfather,
Jack Barton, who never returned from the war, was found in Norway, he finds himself traveling into his family’s past and physically to Norway to search for answers. With the help of Scott Wilcox, a Canadian government investigator, and some locals, she pieced together the story of her grandfather’s last mission.
Mason does a wonderful job of pacing the novel, writing short suspense-style chapters that weave back and forth from scenes with Alison and Scott to scenes with her grandfather, a German pilot, and a victim of heinous cruelty. As Alison pieces together her grandfather’s past, the reader witnesses the events, including some dramatic action-packed moments and a surprising partnership between two men on opposite sides of the war.
To say much more would be to reveal too much of the plot. But I assure readers that the story comes to a satisfying and heartfelt conclusion. It is never easy to write about the Second World War: its atrocities are something we wish we could forget, but we know we never can if we want to prevent them from happening again. It was a time that tested the souls of men, but as Mason shows, in the midst of all the tragedy and horror, good things also happened. As Alison realizes at the end of the novel, the war reflected “So much cruelty and horror in the world. So much hate”, but also “So much kindness”.
The end of the novel is both surprising and cathartic: I was left with goosebumps and tears as Alison finally overcomes her stress and disenchantment with her role as CEO to make an unprecedented ethical decision that It will benefit countless lives. The most poignant thing is that she could not have made such a decision were it not for each and every event, both heroic and horrific, to which she has been inextricably connected.
Read EO-N. You will not be disappointed. The story is based on the work of real-life members of the Royal Canadian Air Force. I only wish that the ending of the novel is also true.