Light
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
May, 1831, and on a tiny island off the Isle of Man a lighthouse provides a harsh living for an unusual family. Lucy and Diya, husbandless and with three children between them, watch over the ancient light on Ellan Bride. Meanwhile the Scottish engineer, Robert Stevenson, is modernising the nation's lighthouses, and Ellan Bride and the future of the family, are under threat. When two surveyors arrive to assess the light, tension escalates to danger point.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Elphinstone's inert ninth novel (following Gato) is set in 1831 on Ellan Bride isle, "hardly more\t\t than a rock with a strip of green, surrounded by the silvery sea," off the more\t\t populated Isle of Man. Lighthouse keeper Lucy inherited the job "at two-thirds\t\t salary "when her brother Jim was killed in a storm five years earlier. Jim's\t\t India-born widow, Diya, has two children, Breesha and Mallay, growing up as\t\t siblings to Lucy's out-of-wedlock son, Billy. Lucy, scarred by past love, keeps\t\t the ancient lighthouse lit each night, as her brother and father did before\t\t her, while the educated Diya tends the garden and gathers puffins from their\t\t burrows, dreaming of her childhood in India. But when handsome, reserved\t\t Archibald Buchanan and his kind, assistant, Ben Groat, suddenly arrive to\t\t survey for a new lighthouse, the women face changes and choices. In alternating\t\t chapters, Elphinstone renders the solitude of the two women amid the salt air\t\t and crashing waves, along with the ambitions and fears of Archibald and Ben.\t\t Aiming for stark, the results are static.
