The Lighthouse
1865
The Bell Rock lies twelve miles off the Scottish coast, a reef that has claimed a thousand ships and the men who sailed them. When fishermen Davy Spink and Jock Swankie row toward it one grey morning, they're after something else entirely: treasure from the wrecks, scattered coins and salvage plucked from the dead. But the rock gives up its own rewards to no one unpunished, and what they find among the wreckage will follow them home. Ruby Brand, a young sailor still raw from his father's drowning, faces different terrors on shore. The press-gangs roam the docks seeking men for the King's ships, and Ruby has already lost everything to the sea. Now he must decide what he's willing to become to survive. Ballantyne writes with the brutal clarity of a man who knew these waters, and The Lighthouse captures 19th-century seafaring life in all its desperate beauty. This is a story about what drives men to pit themselves against the ocean's indifference, and what they find when they look back toward shore.
