I Am Able to Tell You Now

As he nears retirement, high school history teacher Ben Henry finds himself thinking more and more about his elderly parents and the loss of family history through the passage of time. With his grandson, Michael, approaching an age where military enlistment was a possibility, Ben's thoughts increasingly turn to his uncle Ernie Wilson, whom he never really knew. Sixteen-year-old Ernie had lied about his age, joined the army, and on August 27, 1943, shipped out from Halifax to do his part in the fight against fascism and bring his older brother, Bill, a POW, home.In I Am Able to Tell You Now, author Bill Kennedy skillfully weaves together two very different fictional storylines-that of a brave young man and his best friend, Jean-Paul Beauchamp, as they suffer the chaos, the fear, and the devastation of war on the Normandy battlefield, and Ben, whose exhaustive research in the early years of the twenty-first century about his uncle and that same battlefield becomes the genesis of I Am Able to Tell You Now, a "book within a book."