Lucy Lethbridge
Look What the Tide Dragged In
The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights and Plundered Ships
By Bella Bathurst
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.
Door after door was opened, and in the grey light of the morning fisher after fisher was seen to come forth yawning and stretching himself, nightcap on head. Fisher after fisher, I wrote, and my pen tripped; for it should stand wrecker after wrecker. There was no emotion. no animation.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf
'The authorities are able to detain individuals in solitary confinement for up to six months at a secret location', which 'increases the risk to the prisoner of torture'.
@lucyjpop looks at two cases of China's brutal crackdown on free expression.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/xu-zhiyong-thupten-lodoe
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back