The Lamplighters

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The Lamplighters

By: Emma Stonex

Narrated by: Indira Varma, Tom Burke

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About this listen

This audiobook is narrated by Indira Varma and Tom Burke.

As recommended by the BBC Radio 2 Book Club.

They say we'll never know what happened to those men. They say the sea keeps its secrets....

Cornwall, 1972. Three lighthouse keepers vanish from a remote rock, miles from the shore. The entrance door is locked from the inside. The clocks have stopped. The principal keeper's weather log describes a mighty storm, but the skies have been clear all week.

What happened to those three men, out on the tower? The heavy sea whispers their names. The tide shifts beneath the swell, drowning ghosts. Can their secrets ever be recovered from the waves?

Twenty years later, the women they left behind are still struggling to move on. Helen, Jenny and Michelle should have been united by the tragedy, but instead it drove them apart. And then a writer approaches them. He wants to give them a chance to tell their side of the story. But only in confronting their darkest fears can the truth begin to surface....

Inspired by real events, The Lamplighters, by Emma Stone is an intoxicating and suspenseful mystery, an unforgettable story of love and grief that explores the way our fears blur the line between the real and the imagined.

Fiction

Genre Fiction

Literary Fiction

Magical Realism

Sea Adventures

Fantasy

Magic

Adventure

Heartfelt

Tear-jerking

Thought-Provoking

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Critic reviews

"A mystery, a love story and a ghost story, all at once. I didn’t want it to end." (S. J. Watson)

Most relevant

This novel may have by chance caught a current interest in 'truths' - how true is one person's truth? Can some truths never be known?
Inspired by obvious deep research in lighthouses and the life of the keepers on them, and by an unexplained disappearance of some keepers on a Hebridean lighthouse in 1900, the author has created her own 'truth' around the disappearance of three keepers from The Maiden Rock some miles off Land's End. A door locked from the inside greeted the men sent to take Keeper Walker off the lighthouse to take him home on leave - and no men.
Stonex has cleverly pieced together the stories of the men and, twenty years later, the memories and intertwined lives of the lovers and wives of the three men. She has created a vivid life well: the unrelenting workings of the lighthouse, the isolation, the sometimes fraught inter-relationships of the men, their backgrounds, the physical hard work - and the massive presence of the greatest character of all: the sea. The women's stories each have their own truths which were hidden at the time of the disappearance; the journalist who comes to interview them has reasons of his own (revealed only at the end) for searching for a truth he knows he can probably never find.
There's also a strand of supernatural - what is the white bird which can sometimes be seen circling, following? Psychological cracks develop; the past haunts men's present minds... There are a lot of themes and moods explored and the men and the women's stories are crammed. For this reason, I think the book might be better read, or at least listened to for a second time. I think I would appreciate more of the subtleties on a second listening - it's SO full that some can be missed on a single hearing.
There is some lovely language - this is Emma Stonex's first novel - I'll certainly look out for her next.

'The sea doesn't care who you are'