Book description
When her children wake in the dead of night to loud bangs and flashing
lights, Ruth is quick to dismiss the commotion as a simple thunderstorm.
Yet it soon becomes apparent that their island port is under attack,
besieged by a gang of violent rebel forces. And they're heading their
way . . .
Forced to flee their home, the family begin a perilous journey of
escape. But Ruth could never have imagined the terrible scenes that they
are forced to confront, as the anarchists wreak havoc, and every
islander is out for themselves in a desperate fight for survival.
The small party of refugees face unimaginable dangers, and with only a
desperate mother's strength to keep them alive, they will be forced to
rely on others for help. But whom can they really trust? Lilian Comber
wrote fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children under the
pseudonym Lillian Beckwith. She is best known for her series of comic
novels based on her time living on a croft in the Scottish Hebrides.
Beckwith was born in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, in 1916, where her
father ran a grocery shop. The shop provided the background for her
memoir About My Father's Business
, a child’s eye view of a 1920s family. She moved to the Isle of Skye
with her husband in 1942, and began writing fiction after moving to the
Isle of Man with her family twenty years later. She also completed a
cookery book, Secrets from a Crofter’s Kitchen
(Arrow, 1976).
Since her death, Beckwith’s novel A Shine of Rainbows
has been made into a film starring Aidan Quinn and Connie Nielsen, which
in 2009 won ‘Best Feature’ awards at the Heartland and Chicago
Children’s Film Festivals.
