Diving Belles

5.00 out of 5 (1 ratings)

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Format:: Hardback
Pages:: 240
Publisher:: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publication Date:: 19 January 2012
Category:: Fantasy
ISBN:: 9781408816851

Description

Along Cornwall's ancient coast, the flotsam and jetsam of the past becomes caught in the cross-currents of the present and, from time to time, a certain kind of magic can float to the surface...Straying husbands lured into the sea can be fetched back, for a fee. Magpies whisper to lonely drivers late at night. Trees can make wishes come true - provided you know how to wish properly first. Houses creak, fill with water and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A teenager's growing pains are sometimes even bigger than him. And, on a windy beach, a small boy and his grandmother keep despair at bay with an old white door. In these stories, Cornish folklore slips into everyday life. Hopes, regrets and memories are entangled with catfish, wrecker's lamps, standing stones and baying hounds, and relationships wax and wane in the glow of a moonlit sea. This luminous, startling and utterly spellbinding debut collection introduces in Lucy Wood a spectacular new voice in contemporary British fiction.

Reader Reviews

Showing 1-2 out of 2 reviews.

“Diving Belles” is the first book by Wood, but it doesn’t seem like it. She writes with a maturity that is rare in a new author. These short stories are set in her native Cornwall, and the sea plays a part in some of the tales. A long dead ship wrecker takes up residence in a young couple’s house, bringing salt and sand and shells in with him. A woman deals with her guilt over her husband’s and son’s deaths by giving up most everything and living in a cave on the shore. Husbands leave home to become mermen. Not all the stories are of the sea, though, but they all deal with the paranormal world- but with the most everyday manner. We see the inhabitants of a house through the eyes of the house itself. An assisted living home specializes in magical beings. An unimaginably old droll teller (a Cornish wandering story teller) finds himself forgetting the historical things that have happened in the town even though he personally saw them. I’ve seen some reviewers likening Wood to Angela Carter, but I disagree. Carter’s work frequently had a bloody mindedness to it that Wood’s lacks. I’d say she was most like Alice Hoffman, but, really, she is not a copy of anyone. Highly recommended for anyone who likes some surrealism and magical realism with their literary fiction.

5.00 out of 5

dark_phoenix54
Often the books you love are the most difficult to write about. How do you capture just what makes them so very, very magical? Diving Belles is one of those books. It hold twelve short stories. Contemporary stories that are somehow timeless. Because they are suffused with the spirit of Cornwall, the thing that I can’t capture in words that makes the place where I was born so very, very magical. Lucy Wood so clearly understands what it is about the sea, what it is is about the moorland. The beauty, the power, the mystery… I don’t have the words, but she does. And she threads all of this through scenes from contemporary life. She catches turning points, moments to remember, stories that should be retold. There’s a pinch of magic too. So one woman may travel in a diving bell to bring home a husband lost at sea. And another may be called back home when spirit of the sea permeates her inland home. It feels strange, it feels other-worldly, and yet it feels utterly real. I was unsettled and I was enraptured. I turned the pages back and forth, not wanting to leave, and because there was something elusive that I couldn’t quite hold on to. Such lovely writing, and such a wonderful spirit. An extraordinary debut. I am struggling for words but, make no mistake, I am smitten.

out of 5

FleurFisher