Top ten lighthouses in fiction

Nicholas Royle is the author of seven novels, two novellas and three volumes of short fiction​. He has edited twenty anthologies of short stories. Reader in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize, he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks.

At the Guardian, Royle tagged his top ten lighthouses in fiction. One title on the list:

In the Cut by Susanna Moore

There’s a little lighthouse in this New York-set thriller first published in 1995. We don’t see much of it, but it’s important. A creative writing teacher witnesses a sex act involving a woman who later winds up dead. On page four we read that “some of [her students] admitted that before completing the Virginia Woolf assignment they’d smoked a little dope and it had helped”. One of the best novels I’ve read in years – and about to be reissued.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue