An orphaned girl is held spellbound by the tales of a lighthouse keeper on the Scottish coast, in a novel by the Costa Award-winning author of The Passion. After her mother is literally swept away by the savage winds off the Atlantic coast of Salts, Scotland, never to be seen again, the orphaned Silver is feeling particularly unmoored. Taken in by the mysterious keeper of a lighthouse on Cape Wrath, Silver finds an anchor in Mr. Pew—blind, as old and legendary as a unicorn, and a yarn spinner of persuasive power. The tale he has to tell Silver is that of a nineteenth-century clergyman named Babel Dark, whose life was divided between a loving light and a mask of deceit. Peopled with such luminaries as Charles Darwin and Robert Louis Stevenson, Mr. Pew’s story within a story within a story soon unfolds like a map. It’s one that Silver must follow if she’s to be led through her own darkness, and to find her own meaning in life, in this novel by a winner of the Costa, Lambda, and E.M. Forster Awards, the author of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit; Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and other acclaimed works. “In her sea-soaked and hypnotic eighth novel, Winterson turns the tale of an orphaned young girl and a blind old man into a fable about love and the power of storytelling…Atmospheric and elusive, Winterson's high-modernist excursion is an inspired meditation on myth and language.”—The New Yorker

But Time is big business, and whoever gets control of Time controls life as we know it! In a house called Tanglewreck lives a girl called Silver and her guardian Mrs Rokabye. Unbeknown to Silver there is a family treasure in the form of a seventeenth-century watch called the Timekeeper, and this treasure holds the key to the mysterious and frightening changes in time. When Silver goes on the run to try and protect herself and the Timekeeper, a remarkable and compelling adventure unfolds, full of brilliance and wit, as is befitting an author with the imagination and style of Jeanette Winterson.

Motherless and anchorless, red-headed Silver is taken in by the timeless Mr. Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse, located at the isolated northwestern tip of Scotland. Pew teaches her to “man the light” but more importantly he tells her ancient tales of longing and rootlessness, of ties that bind and of the slippages that occur throughout every life, not least those of the local inhabitants. One local, Babel Dark, a nineteenth-century clergyman who loved one woman but married another, opens like a map that Silver must follow. Caught in her own particular darknesses, she embarks on an Ulyssean sift through the stories we tell ourselves, stories of love and loss, of passion and regret, stories of unending journeys that move through places and times, and the bleak finality of the shores of betrayal. A story of mutability, of talking birds and stolen books, of Darwin and Stevenson and of the Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, Lighthousekeeping is a way in to the rooms of our own that we secretly inhabit and the lighthouses we strive towards. Jeanette Winterson is one of the most extraordinary and original writers of her generation and this shows her at her lyrical best.

The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman. “At once a love story and a philosophical meditation.” —New York Times Book Review.

In this comprehensive introduction to Winterson's work, Sonya Andermahr considers its significance in the context of contemporary British culture and literary history. Including an interview with the author, this guide offers an accessible reading of all Winterson's work and an overview of the varied critical reception this has received.

"Jean Pendziwol’s beautifully written novel captured me from the very first page. Its descriptions of the windswept lightkeeper’s station of Elizabeth’s and Emily’s youth are so crisply rendered I felt I was standing on its shores watching the great ships cross the stormy waters of Lake Superior. Even more than its vivid evocation of a unique time and place, The LightKeeper's Daughters is a sensitive and moving examination of the nature of identity, the importance of family, and the possibility of second chances."—Heather Young, author of The Lose Girls With the haunting atmosphere and emotional power of The Language of Flowers,Orphan Train, and The Light Between Oceans, critically acclaimed children’s author Jean E. Pendziwol’s adult debut is an affecting story of family, identity, and art that involves a decades-old mystery. Though her mind is still sharp, Elizabeth’s eyes have failed. No longer able to linger over her beloved books or gaze at the paintings that move her spirit, she fills the void with music and memories of her family, especially her beloved twin sister, Emily. When her late father’s journals are discovered after an accident, the past suddenly becomes all too present. With the help of Morgan, a delinquent teenager performing community service at her senior home, Elizabeth goes through the diaries, a journey through time that brings the two women closer together. Entry by entry, these unlikely friends are drawn deep into a world far removed from their own, to Porphyry Island on Lake Superior, where Elizabeth’s father manned the lighthouse and raised his young family seventy years before. As the words on these musty pages come alive, Elizabeth and Morgan begin to realize that their fates are connected to the isolated island in ways they never dreamed. While the discovery of Morgan’s connection sheds light onto her own family mysteries, the faded pages of the journals will shake the foundation of everything Elizabeth thinks she knows and bring the secrets of the past into the light.