Desperate Times: 3

By Ethyl Smith

July 1680: Richard Cameron is dead, and John Steel and Lucas Brotherstone have only just escaped capture by government forces.The net widens to arrest anyone suspected of Covenanter sympathies, and the army becomes ever more brutal in its suppression of the rebels.To have any hope of survival Lucas Brotherstone must escape to Holland, and John Steel is determined to make this happen.Desperate Times is the third historical novel in Ethyl Smith's series about the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary times.Review of Changed Times (Part 1) by James Roberston'In a recent public lecture on 'Scottish Literature and Power', the distinguished writer and journalist Neal Ascherson commented that treatment of the Covenanters in our literature is "fascinating and revealing" and that although every age reinvents them for its own purpose, all recognise the Covenanters as "rebels against a power establishment." Ethyl Smith is the latest writer to explore the legacy of the Covenanters: her novel depicts ordinary people forced by circumstance to weigh their religious faith and their political beliefs against the everyday practicalities of survival. It is an unsustainable balancing act, and Ms Smith does not shrink from showing the brutality and destruction that result. She writes with a fine ear for Scots speech, and with a sensitive awareness to the different ways in which history intrudes upon the lives of men and women, soldiers and civilians, adults and children. Changed Times, the first in a projected trilogy, reminds us that the past is neither as distant nor as complete as we might like to think.'

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 191094646X
• ISBN13: 9781910946466
• Release Date: October 2018
• Publisher: Thunderpoint Limited
• Length: 226 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 7.8"