The Main Cages

Description

The acclaimed first novel by one of our most gifted young writers, author of The Bronski House and The Spirit Wrestlers. Philip Marsden's brilliant first novel is set in the 1930s, in the small Cornish fishing village of Polmayne. A newcomer to the village, Jack Sweeney, buys a boat and establishes himself as a fisherman, gradually winning the respect even of the village elders. But times are changing, and a new kind of visitor is beginning to appear in Polmayne. A bohemian colony of artists offends some sensibilities, while a hotel is opened to accommodate the summer tourists, and pleasure steamers mingle with the fishing boats in the harbour. Yet, despite the superficial changes, the old ways and the old hazards of Cornish life endure. Offshore, just below the surface of the waves, lie the Main Cages, a treacherous outcrop of rock where many ships and many lives have been lost. Firmly rooted in a particular place and time, yet recalling in its universality such books as Graham Swift's Waterland and E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, The Main Cages is a gripping story of love and death, and a remarkable fictional debut.

Philip Marsden is the author of A Far Country: Travels in Ethiopia, The Crossing Place: Among the Armenians (which won the Somerset Maugham Award), The Bronski House, The Spirit-Wrestlers: And Other Survivors of the Russian Century'(winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year Award) and the novel The Main Cages. He is the editor of The Spectator Book of Travel Writing and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His work has been translated into ten languages.

'Much more than mere beach-reading. MArsden writes with deep feeling for a simpler, more meaningful life - and with a real sense of drama of each and every life.' Evening Standard 'Sails us back to a world somewhere between du Maurier's Frenchman's Creek and Swallows and Amazons.' Observer