Diving Belles - Softcover

Wood, Lucy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408830434 ISBN 13: 9781408830437

Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2013

Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2012

Along Cornwall's ancient coast, from time to time, the flotsam and jetsam of the past can become caught in the cross-currents of the present and a certain kind of magic floats to the surface... Straying husbands lured into the sea can be fetched back, for a fee. Houses creak, fill with water and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants. And, on a windy beach, a small boy and his grandmother keep despair at bay with an old white door. In these stories, hopes, regrets and memories are entangled with catfish, wreckers' lamps and baying hounds as Cornish folklore slips into everyday life.

About this title

Review:

Utterly different in every way from Keret, in their Angela Carter-ish Englishness, but equally compelling (Erica Wagner The Times)

Wood's finely wrought collection has touches of a benign Angela Carter and recalls the playful yet political transmogrifications of Atwood and Byatt (Guardian)

[A] refreshing debut collection about seasiders young and old ... A winning combination of spooky mystery and toast-and-tea cosiness, with much warmth and tenderness, even as an unsettling quality remains, as if Wood might be enjoying a joke you can't quite figure out (Metro)

These stories are brilliantly uncanny: not because of the ghosts and giants and talking birds which haunt their margins, but because of what those unsettling presences mean for the very human characters at their centre ... A startling, and startlingly good, debut (Jon McGregor)

Wood's imagination is extraordinary; she has an instinct for the inner meanings of myths that echoes the great Angela Carter. Superb (Kate Saunders The Times)

Cornish folklore for the modern day done in a beautiful, spooky way (Harper's Bazaar)

Lucy Wood has an intensity and clarity of expression, deeply rooted in a sense of place. Her stories have a purity and strength, and an underlying human warmth; they resonate in the mind (Philip Hensher)

Each year, book blurbs tell you that a thousand new writers have fresh, distinctive voices. But fresh, distinctive voices are actually very rare. Lucy Wood has one (Michel Faber)

These are stories from the places where magic and reality meet. It is as if the Cornish moors and coasts have whispered secrets into Lucy Wood's ears and, in response, she has fashioned exquisite tales of mystery and humanity. In her prose, the fabulous moves across the everyday like the surf moving over the shore, shifting it in subtle measures, leaving it altered in its wake (Ali Shaw, author of The Girl with Glass Feet)

A vibrant new voice (Tatler)

Book Description:

A luminous, startling and utterly spellbinding debut which introduces a spectacular new voice in contemporary British fiction

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1408830434
• ISBN 13: 9781408830437
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240