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by Lucy Wood (Author)
In the tradition of Angela Carter, this luminous, spellbinding debut reinvents the stuff of myth.
Straying husbands lured into the sea by mermaids can be fetched back, for a fee. Trees can make wishes come true. Houses creak and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A mother, who seems alone and lonely, may be rubbing sore muscles or holding the hands of her invisible lover as he touches her neck. Phantom hounds roam the moors and, on a windy beach, a boy and his grandmother beat back despair with an old white door. In these stories, the line between the real and the imagined is blurred as Lucy Wood takes us to Cornwall's ancient coast, building on its rich storytelling history and recasting its myths in thoroughly contemporary ways. Calling forth the fantastic and fantastical, she mines these legends for that bit of magic remaining in all our lives--if only we can let ourselves see it.Front Jacket
In the tradition of Angela Carter, this luminous, spellbinding debut reinvents the stuff of myth.
Straying husbands lured into the sea by mermaids can be fetched back, for a fee. Trees can make wishes come true. Houses creak and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A mother, who seems alone and lonely, may be rubbing sore muscles or holding the hands of her invisible lover as he touches her neck. Phantom hounds roam the moors and, on a windy beach, a boy and his grandmother beat back despair with an old white door.
In these stories, the line between the real and the imagined is blurred as Lucy Wood takes us to Cornwall s ancient coast, building on its rich storytelling history and recasting its myths in thoroughly contemporary ways. Calling forth the fantastic and fantastical, she mines these legends for that bit of magic remaining in all our lives if only we can let ourselves see it.
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Back Jacket
Lucy Wood is a sorceress. These stories unfold in a dreamy marine light, one that reveals the miraculous in the everyday. Diving Belles is a perfect name for this debut: It is guaranteed to enrapture a reader, and you ll want to come up slowly from its depths. Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
Fresh, distinctive voices are actually very rare. Lucy Wood has one. Michel Faber, author of The Crimson Petal and the White
Diving Belles is a lovely, absorbing collection of tales, animated by Lucy Wood s remarkable gift for evoking Cornwall as both a physical and mythic place. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles
These stories are brilliantly uncanny: not because of the ghosts and giants and talking birds which haunt their margins, but because of what those unsettling presences mean for the very human characters at their center. A startling, and startlingly good, debut. Jon McGregor, author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
These are stories from the places where magic and reality meet. It is as if the Cornish moors and coasts have whispered secrets into Lucy Wood s ears and, in response, she has fashioned exquisite tales of mystery and humanity. Ali Shaw, author of The Girl with Glass Feet
