A luminous, startling and utterly spellbinding debut which introduces a spectacular new voice in contemporary British fiction
Lucy Wood has a Master's degree in Creative Writing from Exeter University. She grew up in Cornwall. Diving Belles is her first work.
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 centre ... A startling, and startlingly good,
debut
*Jon McGregor*
Lucy Wood has an intensity and clarity of expression, deeply rooted
in a sense of place. Her stories have a purity and strength, and an
underlying human warmth; they resonate in the mind
*Philip Hensher*
Each year, book blurbs tell you that a thousand new writers have
fresh, distinctive voices. But fresh, distinctive voices are
actually very rare. Lucy Wood has one
*Michel Faber*
Enchanting short stories
*Guardian, Books of the Year*
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. In her prose, the fabulous moves
across the everyday like the surf moving over the shore, shifting
it in subtle measures, leaving it altered in its wake
*Ali Shaw, author of The Girl with Glass Feet*
Cornish folklore for the modern day done in a beautiful, spooky
way
*Harper's Bazaar*
A vibrant new voice
*Tatler*
Utterly different in every way from Keret, in their Angela
Carter-ish Englishness, but equally compelling
*The Times*
Wood's finely wrought collection has touches of a benign Angela
Carter and recalls the playful yet political transmogrifications of
Atwood and Byatt
*Guardian*
[A] refreshing debut collection about seasiders young and old ... A
winning combination of spooky mystery and toast-and-tea cosiness,
with much warmth and tenderness, even as an unsettling quality
remains, as if Wood might be enjoying a joke you can't quite figure
out
*Metro*
One of the best aspects of these stories is the way in which the
daily lives of their characters become imbued with a mystical,
folkloric significance ... although many readers will enjoy the
evocations of Cornish myth and the looming presence of the
landscape, Wood's major talent is as an observer of the
everyday
*Times Literary Supplement*
Wood plays with the county's myth and folklore to make it seem
exotic and eldritch ... Wood has a wonderfully deadpan way with her
surreal subject matter, and writes equally well about the more
quotidian topics of work and love
*Literary Review*
Her use of Cornish folk tales as the backdrop for very modern tales
of loss and loneliness was inspired
*Jon McGregor, Irish Times*
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