The Lamplighters
EMMA STONEX
(PICADOR, 368 PP, £14 99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

Perhaps we have all been lighthouse keepers this year – cleaning, keeping boats off the rocks, longing and dreading the arrival of the relief boat. Longing because we want to rediscover open land; dreading because we can’t control it the way we control our tiny lighthouse homes.

It may not be the best moment to publish a book about three isolated men who disappear in strange circumstances from the Maiden Rock lighthouse, Land’s End. I say this because we have all become such experts at close living with others that the last thing we may want to read is a fictional account of more of it. Emma Stonex has no such misgivings. “Lighthouses,” she says, “are my lifelong fascination.”