Springhaven: A Tale of the Great War

Blackmore, the master behind Lorna Doone, returns to the West Country he knew so intimately in this lesser-known gem. Springhaven is a Sussex coastal village where the rhythm of fishing boats and village gossip masks a growing dread: Napoleon's armies are massing across the Channel, and invasion feels less like fear and more like inevitability. At the center are Dolly Darling, a young woman suffocated by the village's quiet rhythms and desperate for something larger than herself, and Captain Zebedee Tugwell, a weathered seafarer whose ordinary life conceals extraordinary depth. Their relationship unfolds against the thrum of approaching war, where the question becomes not just whether France will come, but what any of us will become when the world we know begins to crack. Blackmore paints the Sussex coast with the same loving precision that made Lorna Doone immortal, creating a pastoral world so vivid you can taste the salt air. The novel pulses with tension between the pastoral and the martial, the personal and the historical. For readers who crave historical fiction that breathes with local color and romantic longing, Springhaven offers both.