Episode 8

Described by 2025 Booker judges as, "A book about dreams, an exploration of class and family, a celebration of the power and the glory of music, a challenge to the limits of realism, and - stunningly - a love story."

The Lancashire coast, the early 1960s. On the day that we meet Thomas Flett as he goes about his daily drudgery, out of the rain-soaked mist the new world comes to him – Edgar Acheson, a Hollywood director, spies him out in the bay with his horse and cart and tracks him down as he returns home from a frustrating few hours shanking for shrimps.

The American wants Thomas’ skills and knowledge of the bay in the fictional town of Longferry which is a location he has scouted for his next film. Over the next 48 hours we become intensely involved in this collision of the two worlds.

Thomas has very few people in his life – both his father and grandfather are dead. The first disappeared to join the army around the time he was born, and he was brought up by his mother and his grandfather, Pop. Friendships at school were difficult as nothing confers outsider status more than being the child of a vanished father and a teenaged unmarried mother in the 1940s. So Acheson’s charismatic presence and warmly open manner strikes a chord with this lonely young man.

The narrative unfurls with the daily tides, which ebb and flow around the twice daily low water - early in the morning and again in the evening. It is the sea and the treacherous sinkpits in the sand of the wide shoreline that dominate Thomas’ life.

Benjamin Wood has crafted a quietly profound story of the margins, a place where the ordinary and the extraordinary can co-exist , and dreams flicker vividly at the edges of reality.

Read by Richard Fleeshman
Abridged and produced by Jill Waters
The Waters Company for BBC Radio 4