Seascraper
Tom lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandfather’s trade as a shanker. His heart is in his music, but these ambitions seem far away from the dreary town around him. Instead he rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey gloomy beach and scrape for shrimp, spending the rest of his time selling his wares, looking after his Ma, and daydreaming about Joan Wyath down the street.
When a striking visitor turns up, an American who oozes glamour, Tom thinks it’s a good deal – show him around the misty coast in exchange for enough money to raise an eyebrow at the bank, maybe enough to broaden the narrow horizons he’s begun to strain against. Mr Acheson says he’s in the movie business, but how much of what he says is Hollywood magic?
SEASCRAPER is a mesmerising portrait of a young man confined in by his class and the ghosts of his family's past, dreaming of artistic fulfilment. It confirms Benjamin Wood as an exceptional talent in British literature.
Reviews
SEASCRAPER is powerful, poignant and poetic. I can’t recommend it enough.
It is a sensuous treat, this novel. So much care has been given to every detail – of shrimps and sea mists and sinkpits, of work and music. A language of the sea washes over every page.
I loved this hugely atmospheric story and its tender portrait of quiet Thomas Flett, a young man who secretly longs to make music, but whose dreams and prospects are constrained by his hard life, local community, upbringing and background. Then a passing American gives him – and us – a brief glimpse into what it means to aspire for something more. Haunting and beautiful, this is a very special novel indeed.
A quiet, unassuming book about honest work and modest dreams, about sons and their duty, and those brief, wonderful moments when we glimpse the possibility of living a different life. Benjamin Wood is a magnificent writer and I intend to read everything he has written.
Benjamin Wood is a singular voice. Intense, original, unforgettable.
If the mark of a great novelist is to make you pay attention to things you’ve never cared about before — in this case, whiskets and fishing regulations — then Wood is up there with the very best. He packs more poetry into his opening paragraph than many a Booker-winner achieves in their entire oeuvre.
Poignant, authentic and yearning.
This novel... only adds to Wood's reputation as one of Britain's most engaging contemporary novelists.
A wrong-footing and enormously compelling coming-of-age narrative
Benjamin Wood has been quietly building a reputation for intricate yet impressively distinct novels, and SEASCRAPER might be the most fully formed yet. His poetic rhythm suits this novella set in a 1960s-era northern coastal town…What Wood does brilliantly here is grapple with the push and pull of family duty, work, upbringing and the possibility of an entirely different life; you’re rooting for Thomas while completely empathising with his constraints
My number one book of 2025 so far.
One of the most moving and most perfect novels I’ve ever read. A deep, soul-yearning love song for the forgotten and the lost. I am in awe of it.
Rich as a novel twice as long, Wood's slim, ethereal fifth novel takes place in and out of the foggy low tides of one day on the Irish Sea in coastal England. Longlisted for the Booker Prize, it almost exists outside of time, during a postwar period steeped in loss and lack…Thomas is a curious and beguiling protagonist—one character tells him, "you're dead mysterious, aren't you?"—as his story expands into a surprising and moving celebration of art and origin.
Wood, the author of four other well-regarded novels, is a precise and pungent writer who conjures the briny, locked-in atmosphere of his setting so completely that one half-expects the pages to be stiff with sea salt and a crustaceous whiff of the catch of the day
A nuanced, gently romantic novel about ambition and identity… [Seascraper’s] elegance and interiority…exposes how much one person can change the way we look at things. …Wood works in multiple plot twists in ways that are both inventive and realistic, suggesting that strangers aren’t always who they seem to be but can have a positive influence all the same.
Beautiful…spare and atmospheric…The narrative plays wonderfully with the line between reality and fantasy...Wood’s novel is a rare and curious pearl.
A book about dreams, an exploration of class and family, a celebration of the power and the glory of music, a challenge to the limits of literary realism, and—stunningly—a love story.
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