The Cove: A Cornish Haunting

For more than fifty years the author has been drawn back, over and again, to a rocky spot on the North Cornwall coast. Her earliest memories of the cove are bound up with idyllic family holidays; as she grows older, however, her sense of connection with the place grows deeper and more complicated. This slippery interface of land and sea - a place of sheer edges and ledges, strange rock formations and eroding, tumbling slate becomes her place of safety from childhood anxiety and, later, the terror of school bullying.

The cove draws her ineluctably. Around the time of her parents' deaths, uncanny things start to happen here. Is it the cove, or is it her? The place that she thought she knew inside out becomes strange. She discovers that her wild cove has a very populated past. A new acquaintanceship with the place begins, shared with her husband and friends, and local farmers who befriend her. But maybe the cove doesn't want to be known. And one day, in her safe recess, she will find herself in danger and come close to death.

Past presences move through these pages as they once inhabited or walked the land around the cove. There are quarrymen who reshaped the cliffs, women manning a wartime airbase up on the hill, a melancholic archaeologist digging up what he ought to leave be, a Bronze-Age woman with excellent teeth. Parents, friends. The artist JMW Turner passes through too, as do Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas and Emma Hardy.

Set on a tiny piece of coast and unfolding through a medium of salt and slate, the elemental indifference of Atlantic Cornwall, The Cove is a lyrical meditation on being a revenant, one who returns. On on how we change, how places change, and how places may change us. On fear, and what happens when our fears come true, and on ways of being in danger. On mortality and on how we do or do not take leave of our dead. On haunting and being on memory, and love.