Alison Moore's first novel,
The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards (New Writer of the Year), winning the McKitterick Prize. Both
The Lighthouse 
and her second novel,
He Wants, were
Observer Books of the Year. Moore's new novel is
Death and the Seaside. One of the author's
top ten seaside novels, as shared at the
Guardian:
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald (1978)
In an abandoned old house in the fictional Suffolk seaside town of Hardborough, widow Florence Green opens a bookshop. She is challenged by rising damp, a poltergeist and local opposition. Hardborough exemplifies insularity: “The town itself was an island between sea and river, muttering and drawing into itself as soon as it felt the cold. Every 50 years or so it had lost, as though careless or indifferent to such things, another means of communication.” As David Nicholls says in an introduction to this witty and tragic novel, the final sentence is “one of the saddest I’ve ever read”.
Read about
another entry on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
Unreliable narrators – from the governess in James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), through Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955), John Self in Martin Amis’s Money (1984), to Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (1991) – could easily warrant a list of their own, but Agatha Christie’s particular employment of the figure in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was considered ground-breaking when the crime thriller was first published. Narrated by Dr James Sheppard, who assists Christie’s famous detective Hercule Poirot in his investigation of the titular killing, this mild-mannered apparently innocuous country doctor turns out to be hiding a dark secret.
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