Lead Review
- Book: The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter
- Location: Beachy Head, Madrid
- Author: Cherry Radford
The first thing when opening the novel to note is that there is a specially compiled Spotify playlist to play along with the book. Songs are listed by chapter. One of the characters is a musician and it is music that essentially forges the connection between Imogen and Santi early on. There is Imogen in and around Beachy Head and Santiago Montoya in Madrid and it is one of his songs, playing in the car, that catches Imogen’s attention.
Imogen reaches out to Santi on Social Media and the first faltering footsteps of exchange are made, each with a different mother tongue, each in their own way a lonely soul. There are smatterings of Spanish, which made it a great read for me as I am learning a little Spanish, little phrases and words are slipped in across throughout the text.
Imogen is living in a borrowed lighthouse, writing articles to make ends meet and is busy imagining the construct of a novel that she is just dying to write. She is also trawling through the secret diaries of her father, the eponymous lighthouse keeper of the title. He has left her a memoir to peruse, it seems history repeats and he was corresponding with a pen friend all those years ago, forging plans, detailing his life.
A novel of love, life and Twitter….. a story inspired by the author’s stranger-than-fiction friendship with a well-known flamenco guitarist in Madrid. The storyline hops around between the characters, mirroring the butterfly nature of Social Media, on to WhatsApp and the progression to Skype.
The book itself, in its physical form, is a delight. Each chapter opens with a light photographic image of the sea and coastline, with, of course, a lighthouse.
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