Along Cornwall's ancient coast, the flotsam and jetsam of the past becomes caught in the cross-currents of the present and, from time to time, a certain kind of magic can float to the surface...Straying husbands lured into the sea can be fetched back, for a fee. Magpies whisper to lonely drivers late at night. Trees can make wishes come true - provided you know how to wish properly first. Houses creak, fill with water and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A teenager's growing pains are sometimes even bigger than him. And, on a windy beach, a small boy and his grandmother keep despair at bay with an old white door. In these stories, Cornish folklore slips into everyday life. Hopes, regrets and memories are entangled with catfish, wrecker's lamps, standing stones and baying hounds, and relationships wax and wane in the glow of a moonlit sea. This luminous, startling and utterly spellbinding debut collection introduces Lucy Wood as a spectacular new voice in contemporary British fiction.
Industry Reviews
Utterly different in every way from Keret, in their Angela Carter-ish Englishness, but equally compelling -- Erica Wagner * The Times *
Wood's finely wrought collection has touches of a benign Angela Carter and recalls the playful yet political transmogrifications of Atwood and Byatt * Guardian *
[A] refreshing debut collection about seasiders young and old ... A winning combination of spooky mystery and toast-and-tea cosiness, with much warmth and tenderness, even as an unsettling quality remains, as if Wood might be enjoying a joke you can't quite figure out * Metro *
These stories are brilliantly uncanny: not because of the ghosts and giants and talking birds which haunt their margins, but because of what those unsettling presences mean for the very human characters at their centre ... A startling, and startlingly good, debut * Jon McGregor *
Wood's imagination is extraordinary; she has an instinct for the inner meanings of myths that echoes the great Angela Carter. Superb -- Kate Saunders * The Times *
Cornish folklore for the modern day done in a beautiful, spooky way * Harper's Bazaar *
Lucy Wood has an intensity and clarity of expression, deeply rooted in a sense of place. Her stories have a purity and strength, and an underlying human warmth; they resonate in the mind * Philip Hensher *
Each year, book blurbs tell you that a thousand new writers have fresh, distinctive voices. But fresh, distinctive voices are actually very rare. Lucy Wood has one * Michel Faber *
These are stories from the places where magic and reality meet. It is as if the Cornish moors and coasts have whispered secrets into Lucy Wood's ears and, in response, she has fashioned exquisite tales of mystery and humanity. In her prose, the fabulous moves across the everyday like the surf moving over the shore, shifting it in subtle measures, leaving it altered in its wake * Ali Shaw, author of The Girl with Glass Feet *
A vibrant new voice * Tatler *
Magical and bewitching * Vogue *
Just when you think the world must be running out of good titles for books, along comes the lovely and intriguing Diving Belles - and the book doesn't disappoint, either. Lucy Wood's twelve short stories bring an offbeat magic-realist touch to modern Cornwall ... Throughout the collection, Wood pulls off a careful balancing act between fantasy and reality, folkloric past and prosaic present -- Phil Baker * Sunday Times *
This bewitching short story collection draws its power from a deft blend of Cornish folklore and everyday contemporary cares ... magic encroaches upon their narratives as slowly but surely as the incoming tide, so that even the most outlandish goings-on come to seem natural -- Hephzibah Anderson * Daily Mail *
Steeped in enchantments and shimmering with an infusion of the area's folklore and landscape ... excellent -- Daneet Steffens * Independent on Sunday *
