Changed Times: 1679 The King, Covenantors, religion and rebellion
“…a remarkable and compelling debut novel” Jan Fortune
How would you react when the safe world you have always known becomes dangerous, and everything you have been taught to believe in is suddenly treasonous?
In Changed Times E thyl Smith eloquently and powerfully writes of the fear, violence and upheaval that spread across Scotland as the resistance movement, driven by the ordinary people of Scotland, opposed King Charles II’s attempts to install himself as the infallible Monarch of the country.
Changed Times brings to life this notorious period of history that culminated in the invasion of Britain in 1688 by William of Orange, the consequences of which are still felt in Scotland and Ireland today.
Congratulations on getting to this stage and I wish you luck with the book when it is published.
James Robertson
‘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.’