The Lighthouse

Alison Moore

The Lighthouse by Alison Moore (eBook ISBN 9780857869968) book cover

Available as eBook

‘A haunting and accomplished novel’ Katy Guest, Independent on Sunday

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012

On the outer deck of a North Sea ferry stands Futh, a middle-aged and newly separated man, on his way to Germany for a restorative walking holiday.

After an inexplicably hostile encounter with a hotel landlord, Futh sets out along the Rhine. As he contemplates an earlier trip to Germany and the things he has done in his life, he does not foresee the potentially devastating consequences of things not done.

The Lighthouse, Alison Moore’s first novel, tells the tense, gripping story of a man trying to find himself, but becoming lost.


“Melancholy and haunting. The sense of loneliness and discomfort and rejection is compelling, the low-key prose carefully handled. It’s a serious novel with a distinctive and unsettling atmosphere”
Margaret Drabble

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“It is this accumulation of the quotidian, in prose as tight as Magnus Mills’s, which lends Moore’s book its standout nature, and brings the novel to its ambiguous, thrilling end”
Philip Womack
the Telegraph

“It all stokes a sense of ominousness that makes the denouement not a bit less shocking”
Hephzibah Anderson
daily Mail

“A haunting and accomplished novel”
Katy Guest
independent On Sunday


Alison Moore

Alison Moore was born in Manchester in 1971. Her stories have been published in various magazines and anthologies including Best British Short Stories 2011. She has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Manchester Fiction Prize, and for the Scott Prize for her first collection. She won first prize in the novella category of The New Writer Prose and Poetry Prizes. She lives near Nottingham with her husband Dan and son Arthur.