Benjamin Wood’s new novel opens in Longferry, a town on the northwest coast, with an unforgettable image of a young working man, Thomas Flett, plying a well-nigh obsolete trade – that of ‘seascraping’ or ‘shanking’. With his horse and cart, he ‘scrounge[s] up’ from the beach a dwindling number of shrimp, practising a craft that goes back through many generations, passed from father to son. In Tom’s case, it has skipped a generation, for his father is mysteriously absent. 

Tom, like many of Wood’s characters, is stranded at a moment of transition. His trade is all but defunct. He ekes out a livelihood reading the treacherous tides, aware that new technologies have overtaken him but unable to move into the modern machine age. He is an illegitimate child living with his mother, who is only sixteen years his senior. Seascraper has in common with Wood’s earlier works a concern for the have-nots struggling to subsist, humiliated, muted, yet longing to realise their potential – a theme announced in Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals (2012), in which a working-class young man is drawn into an elite Cambridge community. Preoccupation with an absent father haunts the lives of many of Wood’s protagonists. The lack of a surviving father who keeps his word and cleaves to his child is the harrowing leitmotif of Wood’s A Station on the Road to Somewhere Better (2018).

A sense of unfulfilled ambition is evident in Tom’s awareness of books, film, art and music, which belong to a world beyond reach. Enter American Edgar Acheson, who is ‘in the movie business’, armed with a camera and the offer of a lucrative job for Tom. ‘I saw you on