Today, I'm delighted to welcome Paul Rushworth-Brown to the #HistFicThursdays blog as part his Coffee Pot Book Club 's book tour. Today, meet Paul's new book The Lost Voices , and discover your next great read! Read on to enjoy an excerpt from this gripping book! First of all, let's meet the book... Some lives pass through history without leaving a trace. The Lost Voices is a work of historical fiction that brings to light those whose stories were never formally recorded—not because they lacked significance, but because their lives unfolded beyond the reach of power, authorship, and recognition. This is the story of ordinary people forced into extraordinary circumstances—individuals navigating a rigid social order shaped by obligation, fear, and quiet resistance. Here, survival depends as much on silence as on action, and choices are made not in moments of glory, but in private, under pressure, and with consequences rarely acknowledged. The novel explores how perso...
This week for #HistFicThursdays, I'm delighted to be teaming up with The Coffee Pot Book Club to shine a spotlight on Jerry Madden 's fabulous book, Steel Valley: Coming of Age in the Ohio Valley in the 1960s ! So, let's meet the book... For readers of The World Played Chess by Robert Dugoni and Last Summer Boys by Bill Rivers Love is never easy...even in easier times, like the 1950s and 1960s in the Ohio Valley with the steel industry booming. Second-generation immigrant families were reaching for the American middle class. And Catholic schools-made feasible by selfless Catholic nuns-promised bigger lives for everyone, including Jack Clark and Laurie Carmine. As they spent years searching for their separate futures, though, they were also stumbling toward love just as their world came crashing down. Steel Valley depicts a story of love longed for, lost, and perhaps still within reach, just as our nation's mythic yesterday became our troubled today, our l...