This is not, outwardly, the stuff of rousing fiction Bonnie's own stories and Sylvia's analysis of her would seem to be the exciting parts. She doesn't really have relationships, at least not many, and not for long: 'she was never, it seemed, quite anyone's type'. She has two part-time cleaning jobs, and acquaintances rather than friends. Bonnie's days are uneventful, her existence devoid of excitement and colour.

But, as it turns out, the fabulously-named Sylvia Slythe is not all she seems.ĭeath and the Seaside is uncommonly simple in its telling, weaving a particular, peculiar kind of magic from everyday details. In this twilight place, filled with previous occupants' left-behind belongings, she finds a source of inspiration when she is befriended by her landlady. She leaves her parents' house and moves into a basement flat (the attic available in the same building would, naturally, be unsuitable). With her thirtieth birthday on the horizon, Bonnie makes a somewhat half-hearted attempt to renew her life.

In fact, it might be more accurate to say she has an obsession with falling or jumping it is a theme she frequently returns to in both her thoughts and her fiction. Perhaps appropriately, given her name, she has a fear of falling or jumping from a great height – from a window or, as she once attempted as a little girl, from a pier. (Review originally published at Nudge, now NB magazine, August 2016 removed from their site when they switched domains)īonnie Falls is a university drop-out and aspiring writer who feels she has never quite amounted to anything.

The lighthouse novel alison moore