• Stedelijke Openbare Bibliotheek Gent, Belgium
  
  
  

Motherless and anchorless, Silver is taken in by the timeless Mr. Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. Pew tells Silver ancient tales of longing and rootlessness, of ties that bind and of the slippages that occur throughout every life.

One life, Babel Dark's, a nineteenth century clergyman, opens like a map that Silver must follow. Caught in her own particular darknesses, she embarks on an Ulyssean sift through the stories we tell ourselves, stories of love and loss, of passion and longing, stories of unending journeys that move through places and times, and the bleak finality of the shores of betrayal.

A story of mutability, of talking birds and stolen books, of Darwin and Stevenson and of the Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, Lighthousekeeping is a way in to the rooms of our own that we secretly inhabit and the lighthouses we strive towards.

Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel. Since then she has published seven novels, including The Passion, Written on the Body and The PowerBook, a collection of short stories, The World and Other Places, a book of essays, Art Objects and most recently a children's picture book, The King of Capri. She has adapted her work for TV, film and stage. She lives in Oxfordshire and London, UK.