Today as part of the blog tour for Common Cause by Kate Hunter I am sharing an excerpt, but first here is the cover, description and purchase link thanks to Kelly at Love Books Tours and Fledgling Press.
About the book
It’s 1915 and Britain is at war as Kate Hunter’s sequel to The Caseroom – shortlisted for the 2017 Saltire First Book Award – opens on the next stage in the lives of Iza Orr, skilled compositor, and the workers in Edinburgh’s print industry. At a time of momentous events, we step alongside Iza as she copes with unexpected complexities of patriotism, women’s suffrage, worker victimisation and a historic wartime lockout. `It seems the country needs starched cloth-lappers and lunatic asylum attendants, but it does not need books, does not need learning and intellectual stimulation.’ Printers are denied reserved occupation status but, with bankruptcies looming, the jobs of Edinburgh’s dwindling number of female hand typesetters are on the line. Riven by challenges both political and personal, Iza must weather conflicting calls for loyalty to nation, to class, to gender, to family – her marriage to troubled John, her children, her estranged daughter Mary, now a grown woman – to discover her true common cause.
Common Cause is available to purchase now ~ Amazon
Excerpt
Now banners were raised, Joe and his stone polisher chums to the fore, and the crowd fell in behind to squash down the alleyway and swell onto the road, stopping carts and lorries and cabs, over the bridge to Tanfield works where a face or two peered down from office windows shut fast. There the march halted a few minutes to chant ‘Unity means victory’ before wheeling about to sweep through tenement streets where windows were pushed open wide for folk to lean out. Tea towels and scarfs got waved, spoons banged on pots and when a wifie at a top-floor window tossed scraps of torn paper others followed suit till confetti swirled in the air like snow.
What with folk sheering off to head for the pub or for home, the march had thinned by the time it reached Iza’s street. Peeling off at Rab’s stair door, she watched what was now a ragged procession saunter on down the road, stop at the far end as though it had lost its way, shuffle, and turn about. Cheers from windows gave the marchers a second wind and Joe and a stone polisher chum, hoisted onto shoulders, came sailing by, their banner billowing, for all the world as though they were captains of a ship being launched. Joe spotted her, waved, called out something she couldn’t hear.
As she entered Rab’s house, she knew she wouldn’t be alone in feeling a dash of regret mixed with jubilation, and not just because their victory march was over.
Sounds so good and I cant wait to get round to reading soon.
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