Flora Johnston in Conversation with Lisa Highton

Join Flora Johnston and Lisa Highton in conversation for the paperback launch of The Paris Peacemakers.

The Paris Peacemakers

Paris, 1919. As the fragile negotiations of the International Peace Conference get underway, typist Stella Rutherford throws herself into her work and the mixture of glamour and devastation the City of Light reveals. She will do anything to escape the grief coming in waves for her beloved brother, Jack, buried near Arras.

Her sister Corran is about to put her academic career to use teaching the troops in France, a chance to see what the experience was like for countless men, including her fiancé, Rob Campbell.

Rob was part of the celebrated Scottish rugby team that was swept up in war fever and mown down in battle. He has been profoundly marked by his time as a surgeon on the front line, devastated by the incessant grind of the injured, dying, and dead.

The Paris Peacemakers follows three Scots as they attempt to pick up the pieces of their lives while the fabric of Europe is stitched together for good or ill.

Flora Johnston Biography

Flora Johnston lives in Edinburgh, and The Paris Peacemakers is her second novel. Her love of Scottish history began at St Andrews University and has spanned working at the National Museum of Scotland and a career in heritage interpretation.

James Robertson described her debut novel, What You Call Free (Ringwood Publishing, 2021), as ‘historical fiction of the highest quality’. She has published several nonfiction historical books and now enjoys exploring the different questions we can ask of the past through fiction.

Lisa Highton Biography

Lisa Highton joined Jenny Brown Associates literary agency as an Associate Agent in 2022.

She was the Founder and Publisher of Two Roads, an imprint of John Murray Press/Hachette, where she published authors including Kirsty Wark, Sally Magnusson, Monty Don, Ruth Hogan, Janet Skeslien Charles, Guinevere Glasfurd, Janet Ellis, Sarah Haywood, Susan Calman and Wendy Cope.

Over a long career in publishing both in the UK and Australia, where she was publishing director of Doubleday, HarperCollins and then Hodder, Lisa has published many bestsellers. She seeks distinctive storytelling, finding hidden stories with emotional heart and connecting them with readers.