Twenty-year-old Thomas Flett lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, Northern England, working his grandpa's trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the drizzly shore to scrape for shrimp, and spends the afternoon selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and sea-scum, pining for his neighbor, Joan Wyeth, and playing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but this remains a private dream. Then a mysterious American arrives in town and enlists Thomas's help in finding a perfect location for his next movie. Though skeptical at first, Thomas learns to trust the stranger, Edgar, and, shaken from the drudgery of his days by the promise of Hollywood glamour, begins to see a different future for himself.
Slim but eventful ... Squarely, cinematically plotted: There’s a flare gun that appears early on with a Chekhovian nod, and a fraught climactic sequence that treads heavily between fever dream and magic realism.
The premise seems humdrum and unpromising, but there is plenty of intrigue ... So much of the drama is simply in the tension of Wood’s sentences, which hook you from the beginning ... The result is a fiercely atmospheric novel that engages the senses.
