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A novel of mystery, passion, loss and longing set on a wild Cornish beach.??
'The novel speaks eloquently for itself... love, certainty, longing, regret, survival. The story features all that and more.' ?Daily Mail ??'A searing story of love, loneliness and tragedy... powerful plotline and stark imagery... descriptions are deeply evocative of the beautiful yet often savage coastal landscapes.' ?Cornwall Today A man has lived on his own beside the sea for many years. From a choice made long ago, he keeps himself separate from the world of people, and is completely at one with his environment. ??His solitude is broken by the discovery, one early morning on the flat sands of a low tide, of a child washed up on the beach. Somehow, she is still alive.? 'Clearly has an intimate knowledge and love of the Cornish coastline and its unique type of village community, which feature so vividly in this charming and surreal tale of human misfits... a keen eye for descriptive detail and a talent for emotional understatement, building to a heartwrenching climax. A great debut.' ?Western Morning News In the village, a woman reflects on a lifelong fascination with an ancient love story as she faces an unknown future.?? She has come back home to face up to the realities of her life - but at the same time, the story of Abelard and Heloise sustains her imagination. The new arrival on the beach sets in chain a sequence of events that no-one can alter, and in this mystical work of literary fiction, we witness a man experiencing our world as though for the first time.?? Discover Sam: the last good man on earth.?? ??'Paints powerful images of the Cornish coastline and the village community.' ?Eastern Daily Press?? 'A canny mix of myth, fable and reality and I have cast my mind back to it frequently since I finished it and been able to see hidden depths.' ?Dovegreyreader A note from the Author: I wrote this novel over a period of two years in a small wooden house overlooking a remote four-mile beach in the south of Cornwall. No electricity, no gas, we kept the place heated with a wood-burning stove and went for long walks on the beach. It's a hypnotic place: you can sit and stare at the sea for hours. There are Oyster Catchers on the beach in the morning, kestrels and peregrines overhead. The other day, a school of dolphins came to play about 20 metres from the shore. I felt very close to the main character, Sam, who relates to the sea and the rest of the world around him in a very pure way. It feels to me now that it's taken me all this time to work out the wisdom of Sam's worldview: now, he seems to me to be entirely sensible. But that's not how most of the other characters in the novel view him, all apart from the girl of course. To most of them, Sam presents a threat. Abelard and Heloise arrived in the novel much later. For a long time, I was thinking about the myth of Tristan and Isolde, which of course was based in Cornwall. But it seemed a little too close to home for comfort, and I liked the idea of Isobel (whose name did keep the link with Tristan!) being fascinated instead by the story of Abelard and Heloise. It's six years on now, and I still spend a lot of my time in the same wooden house and I still think about Sam a lot. I hope you enjoy meeting him.
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