For over five decades Beth Lynch has been drawn back, over and again, to a rocky spot on the North Cornwall coast. Her earliest memories of the cove are bound up with idyllic family holidays; as she grows older, however, her sense of connection with the place grows deeper and more complicated. This slippery interface of land and sea – a site of sheer edges and ledges, peculiar rock formations and eroding, tumbling slate – becomes her childhood refuge from anxiety and school bullying.
Around the time of her parents’ deaths, strange things start to happen in and around the cove, and Lynch is left wondering how well she really knows this minute section of coast that draws her so ineluctably. Is it the cove, or is it her? What secrets does the cove have to share? Is she safer staying away?
Unfolding through a medium of salt and slate, the elemental indifference of Atlantic Cornwall, The Cove is a lyrical meditation on being a revenant, on haunting and being haunted. Through encounters with quarrymen, wartime women and a enigmatic archaeologist – along with JMW Turner, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas and Emma Hardy – Lynch contemplates what happens when our deepest fears materialise, reflecting on mortality and the nuanced ways in which we take leave of our dead. She explores the profound impacts of change – in ourselves, in places and in the transformative dance between the two.
Around the time of her parents’ deaths, strange things start to happen in and around the cove, and Lynch is left wondering how well she really knows this minute section of coast that draws her so ineluctably. Is it the cove, or is it her? What secrets does the cove have to share? Is she safer staying away?
Unfolding through a medium of salt and slate, the elemental indifference of Atlantic Cornwall, The Cove is a lyrical meditation on being a revenant, on haunting and being haunted. Through encounters with quarrymen, wartime women and a enigmatic archaeologist – along with JMW Turner, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas and Emma Hardy – Lynch contemplates what happens when our deepest fears materialise, reflecting on mortality and the nuanced ways in which we take leave of our dead. She explores the profound impacts of change – in ourselves, in places and in the transformative dance between the two.
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Reviews
Much like reading Where the Hornbeam Grows, I was continually taken aback by the skill and nuance of Beth's observations - how vividly, beautifully and of course lyrically she conjured both the scenery and atmosphere of every place in the book, not least the cove itself. The Cove also brought freshly and sharply to mind the physical places that have been anchors in my own life, highlighting elements I'd not thought about, as only the good books manage to do . . . This is a book that stays with you and widens your perception of how people and place intertwine
A mesmerising, elegiac mix of meditation and memoir
Lynch writes lyrically about the natural world
A beautiful memoir. I loved the literary and historical layerings to the narrative . . . a delightful sense of tension, even jeopardy in places that was impressive
Beth Lynch is a gifted writer