“Transported me effortlessly…Haunting, harrowing and heartbreaking, this is a novel that will stay with you.” --Ashley Audrain, New York Times bestselling author of The Push “A ghost story and fantastically gripping psychological investigation rolled into one. It is also a pitch-perfect piece of writing. . . . As with Shirley Jackson’s work or Sarah Waters’s masterpiece Affinity, in Stonex’s hands the unspoken, unexamined, unseen world we can call the supernatural, a world fed by repression and lies, becomes terrifyingly tangible.” --The Guardian (London) Inspired by a haunting true story, a gorgeous and atmospheric novel about the mysterious disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from a remote tower miles from the Cornish coast--and about the wives who were left behind. What strange fate befell these doomed men? The heavy sea whispers their names. Black rocks roll beneath the surface, drowning ghosts. And out of the swell like a finger of light, the salt-scratched tower stands lonely and magnificent. It's New Year's Eve, 1972, when a boat pulls up to the Maiden Rock lighthouse with relief for the keepers. But no one greets them. When the entrance door, locked from the inside, is battered down, rescuers find an empty tower. A table is laid for a meal not eaten. The Principal Keeper's weather log describes a storm raging round the tower, but the skies have been clear. And the clocks have all stopped at 8:45. Two decades later, the keepers' wives are visited by a writer determined to find the truth about the men's disappearance. Moving between the women's stories and the men's last weeks together in the lighthouse, long-held secrets surface and truths twist into lies as we piece together what happened, why, and who to believe. In her riveting and suspenseful novel, Emma Stonex writes a story of isolation and obsession, of reality and illusion, and of what it takes to keep the light burning when all else is swallowed by dark.

There were no positive takes on The Lamplighters, just a variety of negative reviews. Some of us were thoroughly disappointed, in that we never found the mystery of how three lighthouse keepers vanished under mysterious circumstances (two clocks set to the same time, a door locked from the inside) or the struggles of their surviving partners compelling. Others thought there were potential in this set-up, and thought that the nuances of the relationships these women had with these odd men who would leave them for weeks were interesting to explore. Unfortunately, even those readers lost their sympathy for Stonex's story by the second half, when the plots were explained in ways either incomplete, pointless, or both. There were actually red herrings that were never explained away (who was the mechanic who knew so much about Brian?), and there were revelations of the plot that actually disappointed us (really, they just slipped off the edge of the balcony?). If the point of the story was to be showing the surprising solution to this riddle like scenario, Stonex kind of couldn't have done a worse job keeping that plot interesting or resolving it. On top of that, the structure of the novel just did not work. The way the womens' story were told was just plain confusing. Sometimes the women are presented as speaking to an author who is investigating the mystery of the men's disappearance, but other times it's an omniscient view on their interior thought. When chapters from these two viewpoints are back to back with the same heading (e.g. 'Jenny'), it's very confusing what information the characters have actually shared and what was publicly known. Also, Stonex just plain hides information from the reader that is simply unbelievable to have hidden for as long as it was. Helen and Arthur lost a child to a sudden drowning accident; there is simply no way we could be following those characters for several chapters and not know that. There is just no way that they or someone around them would just happen to not mention one of the most traumatic tragedies a person can suffer for that long. Stonex's book is just filled with this kind of sloppy and lazy execution, and if the center of your story is a mystery, you just cannot have your solutions be this boring and full of obvious holes. There are another flaws in The Lamplighters, but it's not even worth documenting. It's a confusing and disappointing book that sets up an only vaguely interesting mystery and then resolves it in a cheap and boring way. Avoid reading this book. You'll either be bored from the first page, or bitter by the last one.