The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Lighthouse is one of those novels which grows on you as you read it and you only realise how good a novel it is a little after you have finished it.
It is written from the point of view of 2 characters. Both have boring, mundane lives. The man,Futh,is someone to whom things happen. He is not a person who could ever be described as proactive. The woman, Ester,is a sad and disappointed person with an inappropriate libido. Futh and Ester virtually never meet or speak to one another but the whole story is about how they are connected.
The plot itself, about a man's one week walking holiday in Germany, is fairly irrelevant. This novel is all about backstory which is fed to the reader drip by drip until, eventually, one realises what has happened and what, indeed, must happen (though the ending is ambiguous).
Throughout this novel about memory the senses dominate. Smell is perhaps the most frequently used but taste and touch are both important too.The writing transports you to a gentle yet cruel world in which very ordinary people live from day to day.


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