Stand Fast, Craig-Royston! (volume I)

Two exiles walk London's Piccadilly, visibly out of place among the fashionable crowd. George Bethune, a proud Scottish poet with Highland blood running hot through his veins, carries both his nationalism and his poverty like invisible luggage. His granddaughter Maisrie, delicate and silent, bears the weight of a family's declining fortunes. George seeks patronage from the noble Lord Musselburgh for a collection of Scottish verse meant for readers abroad. But beneath this modest errand lies something deeper: a man who cannot stop belonging to mountains he no longer lives among, and a young woman learning that beauty and grace are not enough to bridge the gap between where her family came from and where they stand now. The novel captures the particular ache of late-Victorian displacement, where empire stretches everywhere yetHOME remains just out of reach. For readers who find beauty in nostalgia and tragedy in the gap between who we are and where we are.