Lucy Lethbridge

Look What the Tide Dragged In

The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights and Plundered Ships

By

HarperCollins 326pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

It was while researching her first book, a biography of her lighthouse-building ancestors the Stevensons, that Bella Bathurst first came upon a description by Robert Louis Stevenson of a village of wreckers. The ship on which Stevenson’s father and grandfather were travelling was trapped in bad weather close to land in the treacherous Pentland Firth. As the ship struggled in the swell and fired a distress signal, those on board could see the inhabitants of the coastal village emerge from their homes in the early morning, ready for a kill.

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