After an encounter with an inexplicably hostile barman at a family-run hotel in Hellhaus, Futh sets out on his week-long circular walk along the Rhine. He is mindful of something he neglected to do there, an omission which threatens to have devastating repercussions for him this time around.At the end of the week, Futh, sunburnt and blistered, comes to the end of his circular walk, returning to what he sees as the sanctuary of the Hellhaus hotel, unaware of the events which have been unfolding there in his absence. The Lighthouse begins on a North Sea ferry, on the blustery outer deck of which stands Futh: a middle-aged, recently-separated man heading to Germany for a restorative walking holiday. Hello I just finished reading this book a couple months ago and now I have to write an essay. But the story he keeps coming back to, the person and the event affecting all others, is his mother and her abandonment of him as a boy, which left him with a void to fill, a substitute to find.He recalls his first trip to Germany with his newly single father. Calling anyone who has read The lighthouse by Alison Moore. As he travels, he contemplates his childhood a complicated friendship with the son of a lonely neighbour his parents' broken marriage and his own. In flight from everyday unhappiness, he sets out on the ferry looking forward to 'a week of good sausage and deep sleep'.The Lighthouse begins on a North Sea ferry, on whose blustery outer deck stands Futh, a middle-aged, recently separated man heading to Germany for a restorative walking holiday.Spending his first night in Hellhaus at a small, family-run hotel, he finds the landlady hospitable but is troubled by an encounter with an inexplicably hostile barman.In the morning, Futh puts the episode behind him and sets out on his week-long circular walk along the Rhine. A lonely, diffident industrial chemist (he concocts artificial smells), our protagonist Futh tries to heal the wounds of separation from his wife with a hiking holiday in the Rhineland - his father's family is German. But it may also feed a long-standing Booker quarrel: the one that sets so-called 'literary' against 'genre' fiction.įor a key component in this novel's mood is our uncertainty about what kind of story we are reading. Disquieting, deceptive, crafted with a sly and measured expertise, Alison Moore's story could certainly deliver a masterclass in slow-burn storytelling to those splashier literary celebs who take more pains over a pyrotechnic paragraph than a watertight plot.

A debut novel from a high-achieving independent publisher, The Lighthouse has surprised some observers with its place on the Man Booker Prize shortlist.

The Lighthouse by Alison Moore