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...
There’s nothing like a global pandemic to make you appreciate the life you had before. Without the freedom to roam around Scotland, my debut book would never have happened. And I’m grateful to this day that it was done and dusted before Covid struck. The fact I’ve been unable to travel the country again to launch Craggy the Coo Wants a Place to Call Home is a trifling inconvenience in the great scheme of what we’ve all endured over the past 13 months or so. I’ve been asked how I picked the places that Craggy travels to in the course of his journey. If I’m honest, they really picked themselves, based on where I happened to be or personally chose to visit in the 18 months or so it took me to put the book together. So let’s start at the start. The first picture I ever took of Craggy on location was in the village of Rockcliffe, Dumfries and Galloway in January 2018. That stretch of the Solway coastline brings back magical memories from my childhood when, to quote one of my favourite autho...