The Last Light at Penvarrow

About this book:

On a wave-battered rock six miles off Land's End, the great Fresnel lens of Penvarrow Light has turned through storms and calms for 120 years—kept alive by mercury, clockwork, and the steady hands of two men. But it's October 1998, and the relief boat has brought more than supplies: a surveyor with orange jacket and laptop, come to measure the tower for automation. In eighteen days, the mercury will be drained, the clockwork gutted, and the last keepers sent ashore.

Gideon and Arthur have tended this light—and each other—in a silence deeper than the sea. Now they face their final watches together: the scent of paraffin and brine, the weight of three hundred pounds of lead ascending the central shaft, the beam sweeping the Devil's Apron one last autumn. As the modern world closes in with its batteries and satellites, they must decide what parts of a shared life survive the darkening of the tower.

Atmospheric and precise as the mechanism it describes, *The Last Light at Penvarrow* is a love story built on duty, a eulogy for a vanishing craft, and a portrait of two men navigating the uncharted currents between an ending and whatever comes after.