Lighthousekeeping - Softcover

Winterson, Jeanette

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007181809 ISBN 13: 9780007181803

Publisher: 4th Estate, 2004

Synopsis

In her sea-soaked and hypnotic eighth novel, Winterson turns the tale of an orphaned young girl and a blind old man into a fable about love and the power of storytelling. Silver, abandoned after the death of her mother in the Scottish town of Salts--a "rock-bitten, sand-edged shell of a town"--is taken in by Pew, a yarn-spinning lighthouse keeper "as old as a unicorn." In the darkness of the lighthouse, he tells never-ending stories about the tortured life of a nineteenth-century clergyman, formerly a minister in Salts, and gradually, it seems, Silver contributes stories of her own. Atmospheric and elusive, Winterson's high-modernist excursion is an inspired meditation on myth and language.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"An inspired meditation on myth and language." --The New Yorker

Lighthousekeeping tells the tale of Silver ("My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate."), an orphaned girl who is taken in by the blind Mr. Pew, the mysterious and miraculously old keeper of a lighthouse on the Scottish coast. Pew tells Silver stories of Babel Dark, a nineteenth-century clergyman. Dark lives two lives: a public one mired in darkness and deceit, and a private one bathed in the light of passionate love. For Silver, Dark s life becomes a map through her own darkness, into her own story, and finally, into love.
"Pew's yarns, and later Silver's, are not just about love and loss . . . but about narrative itself, and the ways in which life refuses to conform to the boundaries of a story, just as desire rebels at the limits of the world." Village Voice

"Intimate, romantic, elegant and charmingly literary, Winterson s new novel is a poetic narrative that reaffirms the power of storytelling to provide hope when times are most desperate, and to give life--and light--when matters seem most dark." Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Winterson weaves a beautiful and coherent tapestry . . . she achieves a quality that justly can be called visionary." Los Angeles Times

Jeanette Winterson is the author of eight novels, a short-story collection, a book of essays, and a children s picture book. She has won numerous awards, including the Whitbread First Novel Award, the John Llewelyn Rhys Prze, and the E. M. Forster Award. She lives in Oxfordshire and London.
"

From the Inside Flap:

Motherless and anchorless, red-headed Silver is taken in by the timeless Mr. Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse, located at the isolated northwestern tip of Scotland. Pew teaches her to "man the light" but more importantly he tells her ancient tales of longing and rootlessness, of ties that bind and of the slippages that occur throughout every life, not least those of the local inhabitants. One local, Babel Dark, a nineteenth-century clergyman who loved one woman but married another, 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 regret, 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 is one of the most extraordinary and original writers of her generation and this shows her at her lyrical best.

"From the Hardcover edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: 4th Estate
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0007181809
• ISBN 13: 9780007181803
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232