The Clockwork Light Keeper
A Seguin Island Lighthouse Adventure

About this book:

On a windswept rock two miles off the Maine coast, sixteen-year-old Ruthie Albright tends the massive first-order Fresnel lens of Seguin Island Light alongside her father, the last civilian keeper on a Coast Guard payroll. It's February 1978, and the station runs on clockwork gravity, vaporized kerosene, and the stubborn rhythm of a world that automation hasn't reached yet—where a five-hundred-pound weight drops through the tower's iron spine to turn three tons of Parisian glass, and a single missed winding means darkness on a coastline that swallows ships whole.

When Thomas leaves for a routine supply run to Bath, the barometer plunges and a nor'easter of historic fury traps him on the mainland. Ruthie is alone in the tower as seventy-knot winds hammer the lantern glass, the mercury bath threatens to freeze, and the clockwork heart of the light begins to falter. Through freezing nights and blinding whiteouts, she must nurse the temperamental vapor lamp, hand-crank the massive drive weight against the storm's resistance, and keep the flash steady for the invisible mariners fighting the same gale—knowing that if the light fails, no one is coming to save them.

*The Clockwork Light Keeper* is a masterclass in atmospheric historical fiction, rendering the mechanics of a vanished way of life with tactile precision while spinning a taut survival thriller rooted in the quiet courage of ordinary people. For readers who love the salt-stung realism of *The Perfect Storm* and the intimate, technical lyricism of *The Light Between Oceans*, this is a novel about the weight of duty, the fragility of human systems against nature's indifference, and a young woman discovering the iron in her own spine.