‘This potent debut by award-winning writer Cole Moreton weaves a richly evocative story of heartache and secrets, set along the precarious coastline of the Sussex Downs. It opens as Jack races from London to the cliffs near Beachy Head, convinced that his wife, Sarah, plans to end her life after a final, failed IVF cycle. But Sarah doesn’t want to be found. Nor does Gabe, a man holed up in a disused lighthouse and known locally as The Keeper. In finding each other they’ll rediscover themselves. Pacy and packed with bittersweet lyricism, it’s a multi-layered tale with a surprise ending.’

Hepzibah Anderson in The Mail on Sunday

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‘Human warmth and bittersweet emotion. I loved this.’

Matt Haig

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‘Wonderfully written. This is a book that will stay with you.’

Anthony Horowitz

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‘An absolute thing of beauty. Not like anything else I’ve read. Fabulous.’

Jane Fallon

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‘Mesmerising and lyrical, creating atmosphere you can breathe and emotion that can shred your heart.’

Peter James

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‘Tremendous speed and pace. The ending took me completely by surprise.’

Jeffrey Archer

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‘A beautifully haunting read. Evocative, spiritual and deeply immersive.’

Reverend Kate Bottley

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‘Beautifully tense and atmospheric. It feels as if the characters are at the edge of the world and could fall off at any time. A page-turner.’

Marianne Power

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The Light Keeper is as compelling and ambitious as it is deeply moving. In the interchange of landscape, characters, the here and now and the “Other” this novel brilliantly captures the real spiritual debate of the twenty-first century.

Peter Stanford in The Tablet

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Carefully paced but intense, detached but compelling, the movement of the novel is as enticing and treacherous as the sea and the coastland cliffs it beautifully evokes.

The main characters are Sarah, desperate to have a child; Jack, her confused and frantic husband out searching for her; and the enigmatic “Keeper” of the local lighthouse. Each has suffered a loss. Each is shaped by heartache and the paralysis it gives way to. The light that the Keeper maintains in this landscape is not in his tall building but in his levelled soul, momentary but guiding, helping avoid a complete and widespread wreckage.

For all its lyricism, this book is raw and wild in its depiction of those human realities we must bear. Love, it says, take us to the edge. But it is also the way we teach each other to be better versions of ourselves. Grief erodes us but it also infiltrates, with a potential release, our unawakened lives with all their self-perpetuating lies about who we think we are and how we wish to be seen.

Canon Mark Oakley, Dean of St John’s College, Cambridge, in the Church Times