Pharos [Paperback]

'PHAROS will entertain and intrigue.' SUNDAY HERALD 'Her writing is spare but elegant, the plot somewhat disturbing and it has a twist in the tale that subverts the reader's preconceptions.' IRELAND ON SUNDAY 'It is unlikely you'll put PHAROS down for the last time without being haunted into the wee small hours.' THE LADY 'Settle down to enjoy knolwdgeable, no-nonsense prose, unusual and original characters and settings, and a plot which is unpredictable, often shocking, but always true to itself.' INDEPENDENT 'An unsettling, intriguing tale.' HISTORICAL NOVELS REVIEW 'PHAROS rejects the classic ghost story for an impressively disorientating opening out of its generic rules.' TLS 'The premise is inspired' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'Thompson's enjoyable magic-tinged slim noir novella, adapts the classic spookily abandoned lighthouse tale into a story of evil spirits.' THE SCOTSMAN 'It is expressionistic in its dream-likeness' THE HERALD

"Thompson's enjoyable magic-tinged slim noir novella, adapts the classic spookily abandoned lighthouse tale into a story of evil spirits."

'An unsettling, intriguing tale'

'How could someone without memory be real at all? Without a memory what kind of a person was she? She was living in a limbo land. She was like a ghost.' A young woman is washed up onto the shores of a remote lighthouse island. She does not know who she is or how she got there. She has no memory. The keeper of the lighthouse and his assistant take her in and feed and clothe her. In classic ghost-story manner, she is not all what she seems and neither is the calm and peaceful island.Set at the time when the slave trade was at its height in the 1860s, Pharos is a vivid, expressionistic ghost story, a wonderful and haunting tale.

Alice Thompson's first novel, Justine, was joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Her second, Pandora's Box, won a Scottish Arts Council Award. She lives in Edinburgh.