• Grade: 7 to 9

A Thrilling tale of mutiny and rebellion!
India, 1857: For sixteen-year-old Jack O?Hara?farmed out to a distant aunt and uncle after the death of his parents?India is an exotic place of wonder and mystery. The sights and smells, the food and local customs, the complicated caste system; everything is different from life back home in the wilds of Canada.
Take the chapattis, for instance. When the five round flatbreads appear on the verandah steps, Jack thinks nothing of it?a careless servant, perhaps, leaving them behind on his way to another task. But Hari has s different theory. When Jack mentions the chapattis to the stable boy?the closest person he has to a friend?he learns that the chapattis mean trouble. In India, in Cawnpore, they are a declaration of war, and horrors Jack can barely imagine are waiting just around the corner.
Within a few days, Jack, his soldier friend, Tommy, Alice, the girl he dreams about, and 1,000 soldiers, women and children will be desperately fighting for their lives in an inadequate entrenchment surrounded by the mutinying Indian Army. Who, if any, will survive as the tragedy unfolds?
Response to Where Soldiers Lie:
“Wilson's story is action-packed, violent and hard hitting. He has developed strong characters capable of generating feelings of empathy as we follow the hardships they endure throughout the course of the novel.? “Canadian Review of Materials

John Wilson was born in 1951 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He did his early growing up on the Island of Skye and in Paisley, near Glasgow. From 1969 to 1974, he attended the University of St. Andrews where he took an Honours B.Sc.. in Geology and never played golf once. He took a position with the Geological Survey of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). In his two years there, he mapped rocks, dodged land mines and watched the country sink ever deeper into civil war. Shortly before he was due to be called into the army, John retreated back to Britain on his way to the safety of Canada. He settled on Calgary where geology was booming and the only danger was freezing to death in January. In 1979, he moved to Edmonton to take up a post with the Alberta Geological Survey. In 1988 he sold a feature article to the Globe and Mail. This fueled a smouldering mid-life crisis and he took up freelance writing full-time. With some success, John mined the experiences of his travels for articles, journalism and photo essays. He even began to express himself poetically and, with a young family, began writing children's stories. He moved to Nanaimo and then Lantzville on Vancouver Island. John has been widely published by a number of Canadian presses, with his acolades including a shortlisting for the Governor General’s Award.

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Where Soldiers Lie