Slowly but surely, events take a sinister turn, where doing the right thing is a matter of perspective, and Sapphy and Conor must decide just whose side they're on. Like the sea itself, these beings can sometimes be calm and beautiful, sometimes angry and awesome. To be familiar with characters of folklore and to find them to be flesh and blood (and inextricably linked with one's own life) are, of course, two quite different matters. The pleasure is in how she leads us to it and, of course, where she then takes us. This early revelation is no real revelation because Dunmore has steered us towards it from the outset. Later, she meets Elvira's brother, and the adventure takes on a whole new dimension. One day Sapphy sees her brother at the cove in conversation with someone half in and half out of the water: Elvira. But, in order to survive, their mother decides - or, more accurately, circumstances dictate - that life must go on. To accept that a man who knew 'every wrinkle of the coast' has been taken by the sea is impossible. They are convinced that, as long as they go on thinking he's alive, there's hope.

Their father disappears, believed lost at sea. And these two actually live there, lucky devils!īut the luck runs out. With spare prose, Dunmore evokes everything wonderful about Cornish seaside holidays. They visit it most summer days, swimming, diving, exploring, picnicking. Sapphy and Conor have 'their own' cove, reached via an overgrown path, a cliff and a perilous jumble of huge black rocks. The modern-day Trewhella family live by the sea, both in the sense of proximity and by virtue of the fact that Mathew is a primarily a fisherman, tending lobsterpots and taking photographs to sell to tourists. Centuries later, the father of Ingo's narrator Sapphy, and her brother Conor, has the same name. Legend has it that she fell in love with a local villager, Mathew Trewhella, having heard him singing in the choir.

This time, the story opens in the church, and with its famous wooden carving of a mermaid. Here, Dunmore returns to Zennor, the setting of her adult novel Darkness in Zennor.

The deep helen dunmore