The Last Light at Merrow
The final Saltmarsh novel. The light is going out for good.
The lighthouse is to be automated and the island emptied. As the last keepers pack forty years into crates, Ada and Nell open the logbook one final time — and read the half that was never meant to be found.
- Published
- 14 September 2023
- Pages
- 468
- ISBN
- 978-1-4091-7720-3
- Audiobook
- 13 h 40 min
The logbook
The men from Trinity House came on a Tuesday, which Ada thought was a coward’s day to end anything. They wore good coats and carried a clipboard each, and they did not take their hats off in the lamp room even though her father, all those years ago, had made the Archdeacon take his off.
“Forty years,” said the taller one, as if the light had been running on a lease. “And now a sensor and a battery will do it.” He tapped the brass of the lens with a pen. Nell, at the top of the stairs, watched her mother’s hand close very slowly around the banister.
That night, when the island was asleep and the beam swung over the water for one of its last thousand turns, Ada took the logbook down from its shelf and opened it at the page that had been torn in 1952. The other half, it turned out, had never left the tower.
Reviews
“Ward writes the sea the way other novelists write a character — patient, cruel and impossible to forget.”
“A quartet that earns every one of its pages. The ending of Merrow left me genuinely winded.”
“Paper Birds in Winter is the kind of book you buy twice: once for yourself, once to give away.”
Start from the beginning
The Lantern Keeper’s Daughter
A lighthouse, a missing father, a winter that will not end.
A Harbour of Small Hours
Every boat that leaves Merrow carries a secret back.
Where the Tide Forgets
Some things the sea gives back. Some it keeps.
