The Sea House
October 7th, 2014. Filed under: Tuesday's Tempting Reads.The Sea House
Elisabeth Gifford’s debut novel, The Sea House, is a story of loss and longing set in the wild isolation of the Outer Hebrides.
Scotland, 1860.
Reverend Alexander Ferguson, naive and newly-ordained, takes up his new parish, a poor, isolated patch on the Hebridean island of Harris. His time on the island will irrevocably change the course of his life, but the white house on the edge of the dunes keeps its silence long after Alexander departs. It will be more than a century before the Sea House reluctantly gives up its secrets.
Ruth and Michael buy the grand but dilapidated building and begin to turn it into a home for the family they hope to have. Their dreams are marred by a shocking discovery. The tiny bones of a baby are buried beneath the house; the child’s fragile legs are fused together — a mermaid child. Who buried the bones? And why? Ruth needs to solve the mystery of her new home — but the answers to her questions may lie in her own past.
Based on a real nineteenth-century letter to The Times in which a Scottish clergyman claimed to have seen a mermaid, The Sea House is an epic, sweeping tale of loss and love, hope and redemption, and how we heal ourselves with the stories we tell.
ISLAND BREEZES
This is a haunting story that takes place then and now. Ruth and Michael bought the Sea House – a very run down house, but in the perfect location looking out to the sea. This was a house that took months of hard labor before they had even two rooms inhabitable.
Their dreams were for the house to become an inn, but the place was becoming a money pit. Oh, yes, there’s also that thing about finding the bones of a mermaid baby and the ghost.
Ruth’s research about mermaids took her (and us) back a century to when the Sea House was a vicarage occupied by a young vicar – one who was also interested in mermaids or selkies as they were sometimes called. The vicar’s story includes Lord Marstone and the people he unfeelingly drove from their homes as well as his search for the selkies.
This was a very intriguing story as Ms Giff ord wove it back and forth between the different characters. It made me want to go visit the Sea House. It was also satisfying to discover the secret of the mermaids. I’m relly looking forward to Ms Gifford’s next book. Can it get any better than this one?
***A special thank you to litfuse for providing a review copy.***
Elisabeth Gifford grew up in a vicarage in the industrial Midlands. She studied French literature and world religions at Leeds University. She is the author of The House of Hope: A Story of God’s Love and Provision for the Abandoned Orphans of China and has written articles for The Times and the Independent and has a Diploma in Creative Writing from Oxford OUDCE and an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway College. She is married with three children. They live in Kingston on Thames but spend as much time as possible in the Hebrides.