⭐ Release Day Book Spotlight ⭐
The Miller's Bride
by Liz Harris
Publication Date: May 27th, 2026
Publisher: Boldwood Books
Pages: 318
Genre: Saga / Women's Fiction
A BRAND-NEW gripping Victorian Scottish historical saga from AWARD-WINNING author Liz Harris. 📖 Perfect for fans of Dilly Court, Rosie Goodwin and Anna Jacobs!
'A well written, authentic Victorian story set in Scotland. It is rich in detail and emotion.'
~ bestselling author Fenella J Miller
When independence comes at a price...
Scotland, 1885
Grace McLeod’s life changes overnight when her father sells the family grocer’s shop and moves the family from their Highland village to a distant fishing town. But Grace refuses to follow.
Desperate to maintain her independence, she reluctantly agrees to an arranged marriage to Angus MacKenzie – a stranger who makes it clear he doesn’t want her, and who is in love with another woman. When Grace arrives at the mill she now must call home, she finds herself entangled in a web of deceit and ambition. Unknown to her, Angus’s cousin is plotting to take over the mill and destroy her marriage from within, and he’s enlisted Angus’s former lover to help him.
As secrets and sabotage threaten to ruin everything Grace has tried to build, she must decide whether to fight for a life she never wanted – or walk away with nothing.
A sweeping, emotionally rich saga set about betrayal, resilience, and a woman brave enough to demand more.
If there’s a troubadour …
by Liz Harris
I’ve often been envious of my writer friends who set their novels in the Mediaeval era or in the Tudor age. Creating a sense of time and place seems fairly straightforward for them – just put some straw on the stone floor, a man in a tabard, a sconce on the wall and readers are transported back to the distant past.
Not so for writers setting their novels in the 1910s, 1920s and early 1930s, though. If there’s a war, they have some help. If there isn’t, it’s difficult to distance the setting from the present day as from early in the 20th century there were telephones, cars and a number of labour-saving devices familiar to us today. Technology has obviously dramatically developed since then, and cars and telephones look very different these days, but that they existed at all at that earlier time makes the recent past feel more akin to the present than it actually is.
When I decided to write three sagas set in Scotland in the 1880s, I realised that establishing the period of those, too, would pose something of a challenge. So in order to research the novels I went to Scotland for a wonderful three weeks, visiting mills and fascinating houses that dated from the 18th and 19th centuries. It was my first time in beautiful Scotland, but it certainly won’t be my last.
The first of the novels to be published, The Miller’s Bride, has a rural setting. It’s set in the small fictional village of Alltburn in 1885. In the story, Grace McLeod, a grocer’s daughter, agrees to marry Angus MacKenzie, the son of a miller who lives in a village some distance away from her family, a man she’s never met.
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| Model of Dalgarvan Mill, Ayrshire |
At that time, there weren’t any cars or telephones, etc – those were the days of horses & carts and word of mouth. Skirts were longer, undergarments boned and prolific, shawls were an everyday feature of a woman’s clothing, and they did like their bonnets. The clothes, therefore, would offer some help with transporting the reader to life in the late 19th century, but it would be a limited help. Remove a boned corset and a few petticoats and you aren’t too far from what women wear today.
As I researched the period, I came to realise that the real differences between 21st century life and life in the late 19th century weren’t captured by laced leather boots and shawls, but rather by showing how the lives of 19th century people were constrained by their environment and its expectations in a way that they aren’t today.
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| a woman in a shawl and a bonnet |
Grace’s life was one of duty. She was expected to live according to the expectations of her family, the community and the church. Preserving her good name and that of her family would be a very real concern. The church, which I should call the kirk, and do so in the novel, didn’t just hold services on Sundays that were attended by most in the village, but it was also vigilant about behaviour in the community.
Throughout a courtship, for example, the young couple was closely watched by the kirk and the family. Where the limits of propriety and sexual behaviour were pushed beyond acceptable boundaries, the kirk could issue public rebukes, fines, and ultimately damage a person’s reputation.
One’s reputation was vital in those times, but it seems to be of less consequence today. It was easy to lose a good reputation, but very hard to win it back. In a tight-knit village, everyone knew who’d visited someone they shouldn’t. Stories spread quickly, and rumour soon became established fact. If a young woman lost her good reputation, she would find it very difficult to make a good marriage.
Domestic work would also play a large part in Grace’s life, more so than with most young people today, this being an age where labour-saving devices have made light of many a menial task. But in Grace’s time, the daily routine of her miller husband, Angus, would give structure to her day and her activities would be fashioned according to his needs.
He would have to open the sluice gates first thing in the morning to allow sufficient water into the mill stream to power the giant wheel. The butterbur leaves, which grew in profusion in the water and on the banks, could clog up the stream so they had to be pulled out every so often.
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| butterbur leaves |
There were no mid-morning breaks in the mill. Everyone stopped working at noon for an hour and ate at that time the meal they called dinner. Each person came to work with their own dinner. Bannocks featured greatly, bread being made daily by the miller’s wife and by wives generally. Bakeries were starting to appear in villages, but where there was a mill on the edge of the village, it was less likely that there’d be a bakery there.
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| determining if the grain has been ground sufficiently finely |
Against a background of expectations, Angus and Grace had to find their way in a marriage that neither wanted, but to which both agreed because if they hadn’t, they deemed that the situation they’d be in would be worse. Alas, as so happens in stories, unknown to Grace and Angus, there were those who for their personal gain were determined that the marriage would fail. And therein hangs the tale.
This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.
Liz Harris
Born in London, Liz Harris graduated from university with a Law degree, and then moved to California, where she led a varied life, from waitressing on Sunset Strip to working as secretary to the CEO of a large Japanese trading company.
Six years later, she returned to London and completed a degree in English, after which she taught secondary school pupils, first in Berkshire, then in Cheshire and finally in Oxfordshire.
In addition to the 29 novels she’s had published since her debut novel The Road Back, Liz has had several short stories in anthologies and magazines.
Liz lives in Windsor, in Berkshire. A member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Historical Novel Society, her interests are travel, the theatre, reading and cryptic crosswords.
To find out more about Liz, visit her website at http://www.lizharrisauthor.com.
