Light
Margaret Elphinstone
Available as Paperback
‘Elphinstone is a worthy successor to writers like Linklater and Mackay Brown, developing themes in the new century with a voice which is distinctly her own.’ Herald
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.
“The heart of this novel is a place described so finely and beguilingly that everyone who reads it will want to go to Ellan Bride.”
Helen Dunmore
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“Moving from landlocked to sea swept Britain, Margaret Elphinstone weaves a sparkling adventure from a few strands of (almost) fact in Light. The hugely inventive Elphinstone takes a fictitious islet off the Isle of Man as the pretext for the 1830s-set yarn that fuses history and fantasy into an exuberantly clever romp, swathed in the mist and spray of northern seas.”
Boyd Tonkin
“Of all the fictional islands in all the world, this one feels the most solidly real.”
the Scotsman
“The prose is crisp… but what stands out is Elphinstone’s sense of a strange time and place.”
times
Margaret Elphinstone
Margaret Elphinstone is the author of eight novels, including The Incomer (1987), A Sparrow’s Flight (1989), Islanders (1994), The Sea Road (2000), Hy Brasil (2002), Voyageurs (2003) and Light (2006). She has also had published short stories, poetry and two books on organic gardening. Her next book, And Some There Be, will be published by Canongate in 2009. She lives in Glasgow and teaches at the University of Strathclyde.