Review
Nora's Army by Denis Collins is an amazing book. I only use “amazing” 3 times every ten
years, now that the word has been co-opted by TV hosts and college kids. Denis Collins presents a time in history,
1932, where very little fiction has focused with precision on Washington DC. This is history and fiction, featuring
members of the bonus army camping in Washington, waiting for recompense and restitution via US Congress. The
technique Collins uses is suitable to his historical realism...chapters from the Point of view of each main
character, with an arresting love triangle, and a huge panorama of events that is made for wide angle high definition
screens. Through prevailing political ideas, there is a love for the world of the past, the specifics of history and
precision of place. With a strong sense of the fundamentals, of a seething city, Collins maneuvers a large cast of
characters through tentative love, racial complexities, interracial love, spiritual and psychological gains. Collins
is endowed with intelligence, the necessary power at the helm, holding it all together. There is suspense throughout
the writer's supreme network: tramps, hobos, veterans, heroes, military icons. Eric Severeid is in the triumvirate of
major characters. This thread of recognizable personality lends an exuberance to the story. I loved roaming the
streets of DC in the first part of the 20th century at a meaningful time, told by a masterful teller of time.
—Grace Cavalieri, The Montserrat Review
Denis Collins
Denis Collins has been a journalist with the Washington Post, Miami Herald and San Jose Mercury News, and a freelance writer in New Zealand, Belgium and the Netherlands. Spying: The Secret History of History, a non-fiction book was published in 2005. He lives in Washington DC where he publishes a creative writing journal, The Oracle.
Summary of Nora's Army
Nora's Army is a racially charged love triangle set in Washington DC during the spring and summer of 1932, when 60,000 WWI
veterans set up camp around the US Capitol to lobby for early payment of a congressional bonus. For one of the first times in American
history, blacks and whites in those camps lived in complete integration. The novel's three main characters are: Nora O'Sullivan, a 17 year old
Irish girl who crossed the Atlantic while tracking a thief. Randolph Walker, 18-year-old Communist organizer. He grew up as a middle class
white kid until the age of 13 when his father discovered his illegitimacy and sent him to DC to live with his black paternal grandfather. Eric
Sevareid, 19-year-old fledgling reporter who writes the first Bonus Army stories. The friendship and romance that develops among Nora, Walker
and Sevareid is the core of the novel.
Reviews
Finally, a Washington novel with George Patton's cavalry, Douglas MacArthur's cigarette holder, a love triangle, Death Marchers and a
nearly happy ending beside the embers of a torched Bonus Army camp.
—Christopher Buckley, author of Thank You for
Smoking
Denis Collins has the eye of an Impressionist painter, the ear of a Beat poet, and the instincts and skills to capture place that rivals
the best of travel writers. He evokes the sights, sounds and passions of an earlier era with exuberant and dramatic precision.
—William F. Allman, author of Apprentices of Wonder
