Victoria Book Prize Society

2006 Winner:

Holding Juno

Mark Zuehlke
“Well-written and appealing, Holding Juno doesn’t shy away from the realities and the horrors of war… Mark Zuehlke doesn’t embellish these horrors; he simply writes the story from a uniquely Canadian point of view.”—Winnipeg Free Press

D-Day ended with the Canadians, who had landed on Juno Beach, six miles inland—the deepest penetration achieved by Allied forces during this longest day in history. But for all the horror endured on June 6, every soldier digging in on this front line knew worse was yet to come, for the Allied toehold on the Normandy coast was extremely tenuous, and out in the darkness beyond no man’s land the Germans were surely massing, intent on throwing the invaders back into the sea.

Holding Juno recreates this pivotal battle with the same dramatic intensity and factual detail that made Juno Beach, in the words of Quill and Quire reviewer Michael Clark, “the defining popular history of Canada’s D-Day battle.”
Mark Zuehlke, a full-time writer since 1980, had published several hundred magazine and newspaper articles before turning in the early 1990s to primarily writing books. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

2006 Finalists: