The Beacon

Description

Marvellously written short novella from Susan Hill - a family story as evocative, gripping and Gothic as her best-selling ghost story, The Woman in Black. Colin. May. Frank. Berenice. The Prime children grew up in a bleak country farm house called The Beacon. Colin and Berenice married locally. May went to university in London, but came home within a year and never left again. Only Frank, quiet, watchful Frank, got away. He left for Fleet Street and a career in journalism but its the publication of a book about his childhood that brings the fame and money he craves - and tears his family apart.

Susan Hill's novels and short stories have won the Whitbread, Somerset Maugham and John Llewellyn Rhys awards, and the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She is the author of 56 books. The play adapted from her famous ghost story, The Woman in Black, has been running in the West End since 1989; it is also a major feature film. Her crime novels featuring DCS Simon Serrailler are currently being adapted for TV. Susan Hill was born in Scarborough and educated at King's College London. She is married to the Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells, and they have two daughters. Susan Hill was appointed a CBE in the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Honours. www.susan-hill.com

A moving, evocative and rewarding novel * The Times * A brilliantly eerie little tale...with a very adroitly handled contemporary theme: the misery memoir * Scotland on Sunday * The Beacon uses a small canvas, but it examines larger issues of truth, mental health and memory... Ideas about wasted lives, about grinding exhaustion at the expense of self-expression and about rank injustice are all here in a novel of great structural and stylistic control * Guardian * Magnificent...It is all done so well, so wisely, that this short book is richly satisfying...it is a little masterpiece * Daily Telegraph * Captivating... There is, from the start, a highly charged atmosphere of anxiety and ambiguity...the suspense and mystery work perfectly, and for this Hill's economy is exactly what is needed * Financial Times *