Stargazing - by Peter Hill (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

When Peter Hill, a student at Dundee College of Art, answered an advert in The Scotsman seeking lighthouse keepers, little did he imagine that within a month he would be living with three men he didn't know in a lighthouse on Pladda, a small remote island off the west coast of Scotland.

Hill was nineteen, it was 1973 and, with his head fed by Vietnam, Zappa, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Watergate and Coronation Street, he spent six months on various lighthouses, "keeping" with all manner of unusual and fascinating people. Within thirty years this way of life was to have disappeared entirely.

The resulting book is a charming and beautifully written memoir that is not only a heartfelt lament for Hill's own youth and innocence but also for a simpler and more honest age.

From the Back Cover

A generous book ... as full of lost dreams as a starry sky on a foggy night Daily Telegraph

It is 1973 and Peter Hill, his head filled with the Vietnam War, Frank Zappa, Jack Kerouac, the Watergate trial and Coronation Street, is about to spend six months on various remote Scottish lighthouses, keeping with all manner of unusual and fascinating people.

This charming and beautifully written account of that time is not only a heartfelt lament for Hill's own youth and innocence but also for a simpler and more honest age.

Poetic and evocative ... What makes Stargazing such a beautiful book is that it is more than an elegy to a vanished profession. It is an elegy to youth and to the constellation of dreams, ambitions and anxieties that is more intense at 19 than it can ever be again Sunday Herald

A gentle comedy of manners, which pitches the green-around-the-gills Hill - an adolescent idealist - into the intrinsically no- nonsense, manly world of the lighthouse Independent

As read on bbc radio 4

Cover photograph: Courtesy of Photonica
Cover design: Ghost

Review Quotes

excellent-- "The Scotsman Magazine"

A passionate account and a fine commemoration of the first profession ever to be made totally redundant.--Bella Bathurst, author of The Lighthouse Stevensons

Both an elegy to an extinct way of life and a tribute to the spirit and expertise of the men who embodied this romance of sea and sky.-- "The Observer"

Few of these books, however, are as wistfully evocative or as thoughtful as Hill's Stargazing.-- "The Independent"

What makes Stargazing such a beautiful book is that it is more than an elegy to a vanished profession. It is a elegy to youth and to the constellation of dreams, ambitions and anxieties that is more intense at 19 than it can ever be again.-- "Sunday Herald"

About the Author

Peter Hill was born to an Australian mother and Scottish father and grew up in Glasgow. Following a brief stint as a lighthouse keeper, he did a number of jobs but for the past twenty years he has focused most of his energy into his art and working as an art critic. He has written for many publications including the Sydney Morning Herald, London Review of Books, Artpresse and Interview and in 1986 founded the arts magazine Alba. He currently lives in Sydney.