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by Blake Gunnels (Author)
Winner - 2025 International Firebird Book Award for Southern Fiction
She didn't come to be found. She came to disappear.
Fleeing the wreckage of her marriage in the aftermath of the Civil War, Jesse Whitmore arrives on Saint Simons Island in 1873 with two children, a carpetbag, and a secret she intends to keep. The island's tidal marshes and Spanish moss offer the kind of quiet that asks no questions - and Jesse needs quiet more than she needs anything else.
But BluffLight is rising on the eastern bluff.
When Jesse is offered the keeper's position at the new lighthouse, she finds herself drawn into something larger than survival: a community fighting to bring light to dangerous waters, an engineer named Jonas Miller who sees through her carefully constructed silence, and a web of old grudges and smuggler's politics that reaches all the way back to Richmond.
Her husband is looking for her. He has never stopped.
A living smell of mud and salt and things growing and dying all at once - By the Light of the Bluff is Southern historical fiction at its most immersive, a novel where the lighthouse is never just a lighthouse, and the light is never just light.
For readers of Delia Owens, Mary Alice Monroe, and Eugenia Price.
