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 who were 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.

Christina Keith came from the small town of Thurso on the far north coast of Scotland. Highly intelligent and ambitious, she became a lecturer in Classics at a time when that was still a brave and unusual choice for a woman. Towards the end of the First World War she left behind the sheltered world of academia to live and work among soldiers of all social backgrounds as a lecturer with the army's education scheme in France. She writes with warmth and humour of her experiences. When she and a companion travel across the devastated battlefields just a short time after the guns have fallen silent, her descriptions are both evocative and moving. "The eye lighted gratefully on a few irregular crosses in little groups together... the one normal thing in this strange world. It was as if weary with looking on earth that was no earth, on grass that was blasted beyond recognition, on ruins that were uncanny in their desolation... on silence that was like the depths of a pit, weary of all...