You don’t think you need a novella about a folk-singing shrimp fisher living with his mother on a fictional stretch of isolated coast until you read Benjamin Wood’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel, Seascraper. Wood conjures wonders from this unlikely material in a tale so richly atmospheric you can almost taste the tang of brine and inhale the sea fog.
As unexpected as his previous four books – which range from a campus intrigue (The Bellwether Revivals) to a sensitive study of a Glaswegian painter (The Ecliptic) – Seascraper follows the daily trials of Tom Flett, a “shanker” who scrapes the sand for its yield at low tide with his trusty horse and wagon, risking his life in a job that is simultaneously boring and dangerous. Tom is clearly in the Hardyesque tradition of unworldly young men who tend the land or work with their hands (Gabriel Oak, Jude Fawley), and it’s this that alerts us to his vulnerability to charmers and chancers.
