The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex

 

The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex.

Published 4th March 2021 by Picador.

From the cover of the book:

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

Cornwall, 1972. Three keepers vanish from a remote lighthouse, 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 Stonex 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.

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Cornwall 1972. Three men disappear from the remote Maiden Tower lighthouse. The mystery is compounded by the fact that the door is firmly bolted from the inside, the clocks have all stopped at the same time, and the Principal Keeper's log has some worrying discrepancies. Where could Arthur Black,  Bill Walker, and Vince Bourne have gone and why?

Cut to twenty years later and a young author is looking into the strange disappearance. He makes contact with the women that the men left behind - Arthur's wife Helen, Bill's wife Jenny, and Vince's girlfriend Michelle. Three women that were irrecoverably divided by the Maiden Tower incident. He is keen to hear their side of the story, but they have their own secret fears to hide and the truth will not come easily.

And so unfurls Emma Stonex's incredible tale of love, loss and eerie mystery, moving back and forth between the events on the Maiden Tower lighthouse in 1972, and the narratives of the three women twenty years later as they lay out their side of the story. It's a tale that is as deep and capricious as the sea that holds the secrets of what happened out there on the tower, full of human frailties, harsh realities and the whisper of something ghostly. 

What we learn about the relationships between the three men and their life 'on the light' is fascinating. In conditions where these men live cheek by jowl, is it difficult to keep anything hidden from one another, and tensions between them in this most claustrophobic of environments are inevitable - especially when their period on duty is extended unexpectedly by bad weather. Each of the men had things on their minds, related to their shore-side lives, that brought them to breaking point and the consequences were catastrophic.

Yet it is not just the men thrown together in the lighthouse that have to bear the brunt of extended periods of isolation: their womenfolk must take the strain too and not all of them are suited to the lives they are expected to lead, causing ripples that reach all the way out to the lonely lighthouse.

Themes of childhood, marriage, loss, grief, violence, jealousy and recrimination lie at the very heart of this beautifully written story, but it is difficult to talk about how Emma Stonex plays out the complicated threads without giving away too much of the all encompassing plot - which I am not about to do, so you will have to read it to experience every tortuous twist and brutal turn for yourself. 

I confess that this story chilled me to the bone and pitched and tossed me about like a small sailing boat on the high seas. The whole piece is wonderfully unsettling and atmospheric, bringing in the wildness of the sea, the raw edge of the weather, and even the Maiden Tower herself almost as if they are additional characters in the story, and there is a delicious undercurrent of ghostly folklore that has you questioning quite how much of what you read is true and how much is imagination. But there is also a feeling of the calm after the storm at the very conclusion, that leaves you with the promise of hope, reconciliation, forgiveness, and the assurance that ghosts can and will finally be laid to rest for the souls left behind that is surprisingly heart-warming.

This is an astonishingly good novel and is one that kept me enthralled from the first page to the last. I am really looking forward to whatever Emma Stonex can conjure up next!

The Lamplighters is available to buy now in hardback, e-book and audio formats.

Thank you to Midas Public Relations for sending me a proof of this book in return for an honest review and for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the author:

Emma Stonex was born in 1983 and grew up in Northamptonshire. After working in publishing for several years, she quit to pursue her dream of writing fiction. The Lamplighters left harbour after a lifelong passion for lighthouses and everything to do with the sea. She lives in the Southwest with her family.