The Owls' House

A Cornish family of smugglers and wreckers over three generations, and a house on the cliff that outlasts all of them. Crosbie Garstin had been a horse-breaker in Canada and South Africa and a cavalry officer in the war before he wrote, and drowned at forty-three off Salcombe. The sea and the excise men are equally dangerous, and the comedy runs right up to the drownings. Fifty-nine plates by painters including Atkinson Grimshaw and Stanhope Forbes follow the harbour steps, moonlit lanes and home-along evenings of the Cornish coast Garstin knew.