Light

Description

The new novel from the acclaimed author of Voyageurs and The Sea Road.May, 1831: a tiny island off the Isle of Man, where a lighthouse provides a harsh living for an unusual family.Isolated from the mainland they have been able to live away from the disapproving eyes of polite society. But, on the arrival of Stevenson's surveyors, the very existence of their world is threatened.Light, set in the 1830s, brings surveyors, imbued with the confidence of Enlightenment Edinburgh, to build a new lighthouse on a remote island. There they discover the women maintaining the old light have values rooted in other times and places and a different perspective on 'progress'. For the island children the ensuing conflict is both an adventure and an introduction to other worlds, geographical and emotional. 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.

* 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 * 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