LUCY: ULTIMATE SURVIVOR

My sister loved the way I ended Lucy commenting ‘Mum and Dad would be so proud if they knew’.  Brought a tear to my eye …

Lucy: Ultimate Survivor is the true story of my amazing great, great, great grandmother. Writing about her life over 200 years ago was not simple.  It’s possible to find birth, marriage and death certificates but many other records have been lost or never existed so one of my challenges was to make sense of things Lucy did, journeys she made, and conjure up the thought process and emotions involved without super-imposing today’s values or beliefs. It began as a family history project and grew into a historical novel published this year.

What did Bristol, Bath, Wolverhampton look like then?  What was the weather like?  How did they dress and travel? What was it like living in Barbados when most of the people there were enslaved?  All these questions led to mountains of historical research and reading other writers’ historical fiction.

I loved all of that!

I also found it useful to come up with a timeline for dates of events that happened during Lucy’s lifetime such wars, famine, the abolition of the slave trade, the assassination of heads of state and inventions like the railway to name a few. Key historical events and people added colour and credibility to the narrative.

With historical fiction an author can never get everything right.  I just tried to make sure no-one could demonstrate I’d got it wrong – unless of course they own private documents I have been unable to access.

They say that inside every person there’s at least one story waiting to be written.  I’m hoping, now I’ve started, I’ve got more than one inside me – so watch this space!

This is the debut novel from Elizabeth Haywood. You can purchase your copy of Lucy: Ultimate Survivor here https://elizabethhaywood.ampbk.com/; https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lucy-Ultimate-Survivor-Elizabeth-Haywood/dp/1528983521

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