Diving Belles - by Lucy Wood (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Straying husbands lured into the sea by mermaids can be fetched back, for a fee. Trees can make wishes come true. Houses creak and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A mother, who seems alone and lonely, may be rubbing sore muscles or holding the hands of her invisible lover as he touches her neck. Phantom hounds roam the moors and, on a windy beach, a boy and his grandmother beat back despair with an old white door.

In these stories, the line between the real and the imagined is blurred as Lucy Wood takes us to Cornwall's ancient coast, building on its rich storytelling history and recasting its myths in thoroughly contemporary ways. Calling forth the fantastic and fantastical, she mines these legends for that bit of magic remaining in all our lives--if only we can let ourselves see it.

From the Back Cover

Lucy Wood is a sorceress. These stories unfold in a dreamy marine light, one that reveals the miraculous in the everyday. Diving Belles is a perfect name for this debut: It is guaranteed to enrapture a reader, and you ll want to come up slowly from its depths. Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

Fresh, distinctive voices are actually very rare. Lucy Wood has one. Michel Faber, author of The Crimson Petal and the White

Diving Belles is a lovely, absorbing collection of tales, animated by Lucy Wood s remarkable gift for evoking Cornwall as both a physical and mythic place. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles
These stories are brilliantly uncanny: not because of the ghosts and giants and talking birds which haunt their margins, but because of what those unsettling presences mean for the very human characters at their center. A startling, and startlingly good, debut. Jon McGregor, author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
These are stories from the places where magic and reality meet. It is as if the Cornish moors and coasts have whispered secrets into Lucy Wood s ears and, in response, she has fashioned exquisite tales of mystery and humanity. Ali Shaw, author of The Girl with Glass Feet

Review Quotes

"Lucy Wood is a sorceress. These stories unfold in a dreamy marine light, one that reveals the miraculous in the everyday. Diving Belles is a perfect name for this debut: It is guaranteed to enrapture a reader, and you'll want to come up slowly from its depths."
--Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

"What sets British writer Wood apart... is how grounded the magical element is in the reality of her stories... The magic is always embedded, not only in familiar stories from folklore, but in the personal myths of the characters' lives. Thus there is a quiet realism to even the most extraordinary events... This combination of subtle humor and everyday magic makes Diving Belles an engaging collection of contemporary folklore."
--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"How easily Lucy Wood in Diving Belles makes magic. In story after story in her debut collection, a previously inert world becomes animated... If part of the exercise of magic is to remind us of the malleable texture of perception (and to awaken our child-like awe at the world), then the magic in 'Notes from the House Spirits' is a wonderful success. Throughout, Wood sprinkles a measured amount of magic, just enough so the rational self can slip away and let the reader wake up her perception and her childlike astonishment at the world again."
--Rumpus

"Diving Belles is a lovely, absorbing collection of tales, animated by Lucy Wood's remarkable gift for evoking Cornwall as both a physical and mythic place. She is writing out of a rich tradition yet making it utterly her own."
--Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles and Madeleine Is Sleeping "Each year, book blurbs tell you that a thousand new writers have fresh, distinctive voices. But fresh, distinctive voices are actually very rare. Lucy Wood has one."
--Michel Faber, author of The Crimson Petal and the White "Lucy Wood has an intensity and clarity of expression, deeply rooted in a sense of place. Her stories have a purity and strength, and an underlying human warmth; they resonate in the mind."
--Philip Hensher, author of The Northern Clemency "These stories are brilliantly uncanny: not because of the ghosts and giants and talking birds which haunt their margins, but because of what those unsettling presences mean for the very human characters at their centre ... A startling, and startlingly good, debut."
--Jon McGregor, author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things "These are stories from the places where magic and reality meet. It is as if the Cornish moors and coasts have whispered secrets into Lucy Wood's ears and, in response, she has fashioned exquisite tales of mystery and humanity. In her prose, the fabulous moves across the everyday like the surf moving over the shore, shifting it in subtle measures, leaving it altered in its wake."
--Ali Shaw, author of The Girl with Glass Feet "Wood captures something fresh, fantastical and eloquent...These stories express a distinctive voice and a gently beguiling imagination." --Kirkus "Whimsical...Lovers of fairy tales and Celtic lore will take pleasure in immersing themselves in the rich, magical world Wood's tales inhabit." --Booklist "Aching and mystical...These are distinctively grown-up fairy tales that re-create a sense of wonder and imagination without the moral endings of their childhood counterparts, but, like them, linger in the imagination." --Publishers Weekly "Magical and bewitching tales."
--Vogue (UK) "Wood's finely wrought collection has touches of a benign Angela Carter a --