A Fire in Their Hearts

Locked in the hold when the crew abandons their ship, The Crown of London,Violet and Samuel cling to each other as the doomed vessel breaks up on rocks off the islands of Orkney. Their love for each other has helped them survive a conflict that has dominated their lives since childhood. They have been persecuted and punished, fought through bitter battles and spent desperate months together as prisoners in Edinburgh's Greyfriars churchyard. Now, banished for life and being transported to work on a plantation in a far-off country, it seems they will pay the ultimate price for their defiance.

Scotland is being ripped apart by a civil war that has already seen thousands die as Covenanters fight the armies of King Charles II over who has the right to be head of the Church of Scotland - King or Jesus. As The Crown of London breaks in two, Violet and Samuel are sucked violently through the broken hull and into the waiting blackness and the freezing waters of the North Sea.

Violet is recaptured along with dozens of other Covenanters, but Samuel is not amongst them. Clinging to the hope that he has somehow survived and that they will meet again, Violet is sent to Barbados where she is forced to work as an indentured servant on a sugar plantation and experience horrors that she could never have imagined possible. But has Samuel survived? And can Violet ever escape her fate on the plantation to search for her lost soulmate?

This epic tale is the story of two ordinary people caught up in the Killing Times, bringing to life a brutal but forgotten period of Scottish history that forged a nation's future.

Highland-based author Philip Paris is best known for his book The Last Witch of Scotland, the historical fiction The Italian Chapel and the non-fiction Orkney's Italian Chapel: The True Story of an Icon. His varied work includes Men Cry Alone, a contemporary novel that broke new ground in raising the profile of domestic abuse against men and which won the 2019 Scottish Association of Writers' Barbara Hammond trophy. Casting Off, a hilarious novel about residents in a Highland care home, was based on his sell-out stage play of the same name.

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