The debut novel
An Improbability of Puffins
The tower is not haunted.
It is remembering.
The debut novel
An Improbability of Puffins
The tower is not haunted.
It is remembering.
An Improbability of Puffins is about what happens when a place remembers more truth than its official records can hold.
An adult speculative mystery set on the Isles of Scilly, where a suspended radio producer inherits a lighthouse from a dead musician she never met and discovers that its failing light is bound to memory, erased women, impossible wrecks and the return of the puffins.
For readers of Adrienne Young’s THE UNMAKING OF JUNE FARROW, Emilia Hart’s THE SIRENS, and Emma Stonex’s THE LAMPLIGHTERS, AN IMPROBABILITY OF PUFFINS combines a lighthouse mystery, a time-bent female inheritance story and a sea-bound family mystery rooted in the reality of the Isles of Scilly.
Ellie Pentreath has spent half her life avoiding the sea. When her radio career collapses after she records a voice no one else believes is there, she returns to the Isles of Scilly expecting an inheritance she can refuse. Instead, a dead musician has left her a lighthouse. There are conditions. Ellie must live there immediately. She must make the light viable. And before midsummer, she must satisfy the Council officer determined to take it from her.
The lighthouse should be empty. But inside it Ellie finds scorched rope, impossible wreck records, a child's drawing of herself, warm glass with no power, and a lullaby caught in radio static. As her sister, niece, first love and the dead man's son are drawn into the tower's mystery, Ellie discovers the failing beam is not simply a light. It is holding shut a rupture in time, memory and the sea. And the puffins that vanished from the headland thirty years ago may have been the first to know something had gone wrong.
Themes explored in An Improbability of Puffins:
Wrong lights
Ships following routes from the wrong years.
Sisterhood
Ellie, Karensa and Beryan learning what must be said aloud.
Female inheritance
The women who kept the light and were edited from the record.
Radio as witness
Room tone, archive tape, callers and public memory.
Puffins returning
Ecology as proof that the pattern has begun to mend.
Island records
Probate, council minutes, caveats, repair notices and erasure.
Teamwork
From rowing gigs to tackling a seam in time, we all need a crew.
Keeping, not owning
The lighthouse as shared work, not possession.