"Eleanor’s Wars" won the Independent Book Publishers Association’s 2016 Benjamin Franklin Gold Medal Award for "Best New Voice in Fiction".  In "Eleanor’s Wars", Ames Sheldon writes about a heroic woman and the impact of the hidden wounds of war.  It’s 1942 and the globe is aflame again. Eleanor Sutton, matriarch of a prosperous New Jersey family, struggles to fight the war on the home front. But then long-buried memories rooted in Eleanor’s service in the Great War come to light. These decades-old secrets threaten her marriage to George—and bring his own carefully guarded secrets to the surface. The narrative alternates between Eleanor and her son Nat, an adolescent trying to find his way at boarding school at Phillips Academy. An aspiring musician who plays in Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, Nat feuds with his father over going to music school. In addition, Eleanor’s Wars touches on forbidden issues lurking under cover of daily life in the 1940s, including the plight of refugees, bullying in school, homophobia, sexism, and PTSD.