The years leading up to and beyond 1912 were restless ones. Across France, and beyond, a new wave of activism was taking shape, a workers’ movement known as Syndicalism. Born from long hours, low wages, and a society split sharply between privilege and poverty, syndicalist ideas spread quickly through the factories, print shops, and workshops of Paris. Young men and women, often barely more than children, found themselves swept into a world where pamphlets carried as much danger as weapons, and where a wrong word could invite police raids or quiet retaliation.

For many, it was not just ideology that pulled them in, but circumstance: a brother needing work, a friend needing solidarity, a family needing protection. This historical atmosphere, a Paris trembling with hope, unrest, and the threat of consequences, forms the backdrop of Tides of Silence. It is not the story’s heart, but it is the world that shapes it. Within these pages, the Syndicalist movement provides the tension that allows Rosalie Bidois’s fictional journey to unfold: a frightened seamstress caught between loyalty to her family and pressures she barely understands; and Margo Kingsley, a widow moving through Parisian and American society with secrets of her own, able to see danger long before a young girl recognises it. It was important to me to anchor their stories in a real historical moment, one that explains how easily ordinary lives could be tipped into extraordinary paths. But it is equally important to make clear: Rosalie Bidois in this novel is a fictionalised character. Nothing in these pages suggests that the real Rosalie Bidois, maid to Madeleine Astor aboard the Titanic, was ever involved in political movements or espionage. Her inclusion here honours her presence in history, while allowing her fictional counterpart to explore a very different narrative. Margo Kingsley is entirely fictional, as are many other characters, events, and subplots woven around her. Their stories exist solely to serve the emotional and dramatic arc of this series. History gives us the scaffolding, the atmosphere of a changing France, the shifting social tides, the vulnerabilities of women navigating powerful worlds, but the people you will meet in these pages walk paths shaped by imagination. I hope this blend of truth and fiction deepens your experience of the novel, adding texture and tension without ever blurring the line between the documented past and the stories we tell to illuminate it. Thank you for stepping into this imagined world alongside the real one. It is a privilege to tell these stories.