Diving Belles
-
- 10,99 €
-
- 10,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Along Cornwall's ancient coast, the flotsam and jetsam of the past becomes caught in the cross-currents of the present and, from time to time, a certain kind of magic can float to the surface...
Straying husbands lured into the sea can be fetched back, for a fee. Magpies whisper to lonely drivers late at night. Trees can make wishes come true - provided you know how to wish properly first. Houses creak, fill with water and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A teenager's growing pains are sometimes even bigger than him. And, on a windy beach, a small boy and his grandmother keep despair at bay with an old white door.
In these stories, Cornish folklore slips into everyday life. Hopes, regrets and memories are entangled with catfish, wrecker's lamps, standing stones and baying hounds, and relationships wax and wane in the glow of a moonlit sea.
This luminous, startling and utterly spellbinding debut collection introduces in Lucy Wood a spectacular new voice in contemporary British fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Each story in Wood's debut collection is set on the misty, craggy coast of Cornwall, England, where the author grew up. Aching and mystical, these tales speak of husbands turned to mermen who haunt nearby shipwrecks, as in the title story; plundering ghosts of thieving sailors in "Lights in Other People's Houses"; fairies who emerge with the application of magical eye cream in "Of Mothers and Little People"; and a moor where "There were hundreds of bones, heaped and leaning like the beams and joints of an abandoned mansion," in "The Giant's Boneyard." Wood never pokes fun at her subjects, no matter how outlandish, treating their lives, loves, and tragedies with respect in landscapes ripe with magical realism. The isolated characters are mired in loneliness, and while transformation is a recurrent theme, few stories offer resolution. Instead, Wood brings into focus what hovers at the edge of reality, pulling those phantoms front and center. Rich with folklore, steeped in the sounds and scents of the ever-present sea, these stories flicker and disappear before reason kicks in, much like the creatures of legend that inhabit them. These are distinctively grown-up fairy tales that recreate a sense of wonder and imagination without the moral endings of their childhood counterparts, but, like them, linger in the imagination.
