Rating: 5⭐️ plus
It was the description and cover that led me to this incredible book, one of those stories that stick with you, a novel that you tuck into pockets and journeys with you, wherever you go.
I only recently discovered Beatrix Penrose but it still didn’t prepare me for the quiet lyrical truth and beauty of her writing here. The depths of the narrative and characters found in a tale that is only 58 pages long. But feels like a long dive into a whole world and people we know.
Luminous. That’s an excellent way to describe this. The journey of Sylvie Carr to a lighthouse at the edge, a small cottage, and something remarkable.
“And then, one Tuesday in March, she had sat down at her desk and looked at the morning’s work — a collection of correspondence from a Victorian engineer, carefully bundled and awaiting description — and found that she could not begin. Not because the work was uninteresting. Because something in her had simply stopped, the way a watch stops, without drama or announcement, somewhere between one tick and the next.”
Archivist Sylvie Carr takes leave of absence. And through a series of unlikely circumstances, ends up at a decommissioned lighthouse inherited by her Aunt Rosalind.
I have read this three times now and have found different elements that delight me or aspects of the story that I hadn’t thought of before that digs deep.
I love it so much. It’s books and discoveries like this that make me love reading and uncovering new authors! New find added to my hoard!
Buy link
The Lighthouse Keeper’s Last Letter
Blurb
When Sylvie Carr, a burned-out archivist, inherits a decommissioned lighthouse on the North Yorkshire coast, she finds a letter on the mantelpiece addressed to her — written in 1947, before she was born.
The ghost of Callum Stroud has been keeper of Dunmore Light for over a century. In life, he wrote hundreds of letters to people in grief, people at crossroads, people who needed a fixed point in the dark. But seven letters he could never finish. Seven people he couldn’t find the words for. And until those letters are complete, he cannot rest.
Sylvie is an archivist. She has spent her career preserving what others made and said and felt. Now, at the edge of the land and the sea, she finally has something of her own to keep.
A warm, quietly luminous story about letters, lighthouses, and the people who stay at the edge of things.
Set in the same world as The Bookshop at the Edge of the Afterlife.
April 16, 2026
Language
English
Print length
58 pages
Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words 