The Fisherman's Gift

The Light Between Oceans meets The Snow Child in this novel set in a Scottish village in the weeks after a young boy mysteriously washes up on shore, causing the buried secrets of the insular community to come to light and rekindling an old love story.

“Breathtaking. An exquisitely written, pitch-perfect look at love and shame, what is lost and what is found.” —Jeannette Walls, New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle and Hang the Moon

It’s 1900 and Skerry, a small Scottish fishing village, is destined for an unyielding winter. During a storm, a young boy washes up on the shore. He bears an uncanny resemblance to teacher Dorothy’s son, lost to the sea at the same age many years before, his body never found.

The village is soon snowed in, and Dorothy agrees to look after the child until they can uncover the mystery of his origins. But over time, the lines between reality and desperate hope start to blur as the boy reminds Dorothy more and more of her own lost child.

The boy’s arrival also finally forces Dorothy to face the truth about her brief but passionate love affair with Joseph, the fisherman who found the boy on the shore and who has been the subject of whispers connecting him to the drowning of Dorothy’s son years earlier.

As the past rises to meet the present, long-buried secrets are unearthed within this tight-knit community, and the child’s arrival becomes a catalyst for something far greater than any of them could imagine.

Julia Kelly has been longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Prize, the Exeter Novel Prize, PenguinWriteNow, and the Bath Novel Award. In 2021 she won the Blue Pencil First Novel Award. Having grown up in a house without television, Julia read anything she could lay her hands on, and as an English teacher, she has tried to pass on her love of stories to the next generation of readers and writers. Since being confined to a wheelchair, Julia has learned to appreciate even more fully the journeys the written word can take us on. She lives in Herefordshire with her partner and between them, they have raised five wonderful children. The Fisherman’s Gift is her debut novel.