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The North Shore
A stunning, gothic debut from a brilliant new literary voice, perfect for fans of Daisy Johnson, Max Porter and Fiona Mozley
You don't pass through the North Shore on the way to anywhere it is the end of the road. The village was like many along that wild coast; inhabited by those who had always lived there, and always would.
The residents know nature's tempestuous ways. They batten down the hatches when the storms rip through, and they clear the debris together in the aftermath.
But the morning after one particularly ferocious storm, something is washed up on the beach that has never appeared before. Something that opens the question of what nature, and the North Shore, are truly capable of.
The North Shore is both a powerful story of transformation and a coming-of-age tale. It speaks of the mysteries that lie between the land and the water and the ways in which we use myths and folklore to understand the strangeness of the world.
172 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 27, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
June 7, 2023
Definitely a novel that comprises several elements, magical realism including, and the one that takes the reader on a journey which is enigmatic and thus not easy to define. There is a child, with a mum and Grandper, no father around, there is a devastating storm and a find on the beach and metamorphosis of the find, there is an intimate journal of adult life and there is an unexpected twist at the very end. This novel is intriguing and opens several alleys to interpretation. I liked the opening and was intrigued by the protagonist's profession but at times I felt lost as well. This may be what the Author had in mind.
*Many thanks to Ben Tufnell, Little, Brown Book Group UK, and NetGalley for arc in exchange for my honest review.*
*Many thanks to Ben Tufnell, Little, Brown Book Group UK, and NetGalley for arc in exchange for my honest review.*
February 20, 2023
I read this book about a month ago but it has only just appeared on Goodreads. I'm not really a fan of being the first person to review a book on here, but here goes...
This is Ben Tufnell’s debut novel but not his first publication. Tufnell was a curator at Tate, Director of Exhibitions at Haunch of Venison and is a founding Director of Parafin, an independent gallery in London. He has a particular interest in land art, art that engages with landscape and nature. I was not aware of Tufnell before coming across this book but I was immediately drawn to this biographical detail perhaps because I am a keen photographer who focuses (pun intended although a lot of my photos are deliberately blurred) on nature.
I have to say that this book was, for all that, not what I expected from reading the blurb. When you read the book’s description, you read about ferocious storms along the Norfolk coast and a young man making a startling discovery on the beach in the aftermath. This though is just the start of the book and is very much a portal into something much more expansive. The details you read are one thread of the book, but in another, much longer, thread, we meet the main character again as a much older person and this part of the book, which interleaves with the original part until it takes over completely, takes the form almost of notes or research into ideas about metamorphoses, about connectivity, about how mythology, especially myths of humans being transformed into plants, is a way to understand the strangeness of the real world. Here in this second part of the narrative, we have an older man looking back (hence the blurb references to “coming of age”, I think) and coming to terms with the fact that his memories often don't quite seem to match his discoveries about the past.
And this idea that the second thread of the book gradually takes over the first thread fits very much with this theme of metamorphosis: this is a book that transforms itself gradually as you read it from one thing at the start to a completely different thing at the end.
It is completely coincidental, but immediately prior to reading this book, I read a novel by Siri Hustvedt. I mention this because both Tufnell and Hustvedt write about art. Also, and this isn’t really relevant, both Tufnell and the Hustvedt book I read include a young woman who wants to be an actor and waits tables at a cafe (she’s the main character in the Hustvedt book and just a cameo in this one). For Tufnell, the works of art he uses are starting points for meditations about human transformations. He casts his net a lot wider, though, and draws on lots of other ideas. Perhaps most obviously for his theme he references Ovid frequently. He also draws on old science fiction movies and on his narrator’s (or perhaps just “his”) family history among lots of other things that swirl around and cross-reference one another.
I have to say I found it a completely engaging book to read and I read it all in a day. I can imagine that it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea because it doesn’t flow or have a plot. Well, it does flow: it flows round and round in circles as it picks up ideas and, to change metaphor, knits them together.
I really liked it.
This is Ben Tufnell’s debut novel but not his first publication. Tufnell was a curator at Tate, Director of Exhibitions at Haunch of Venison and is a founding Director of Parafin, an independent gallery in London. He has a particular interest in land art, art that engages with landscape and nature. I was not aware of Tufnell before coming across this book but I was immediately drawn to this biographical detail perhaps because I am a keen photographer who focuses (pun intended although a lot of my photos are deliberately blurred) on nature.
I have to say that this book was, for all that, not what I expected from reading the blurb. When you read the book’s description, you read about ferocious storms along the Norfolk coast and a young man making a startling discovery on the beach in the aftermath. This though is just the start of the book and is very much a portal into something much more expansive. The details you read are one thread of the book, but in another, much longer, thread, we meet the main character again as a much older person and this part of the book, which interleaves with the original part until it takes over completely, takes the form almost of notes or research into ideas about metamorphoses, about connectivity, about how mythology, especially myths of humans being transformed into plants, is a way to understand the strangeness of the real world. Here in this second part of the narrative, we have an older man looking back (hence the blurb references to “coming of age”, I think) and coming to terms with the fact that his memories often don't quite seem to match his discoveries about the past.
And this idea that the second thread of the book gradually takes over the first thread fits very much with this theme of metamorphosis: this is a book that transforms itself gradually as you read it from one thing at the start to a completely different thing at the end.
It is completely coincidental, but immediately prior to reading this book, I read a novel by Siri Hustvedt. I mention this because both Tufnell and Hustvedt write about art. Also, and this isn’t really relevant, both Tufnell and the Hustvedt book I read include a young woman who wants to be an actor and waits tables at a cafe (she’s the main character in the Hustvedt book and just a cameo in this one). For Tufnell, the works of art he uses are starting points for meditations about human transformations. He casts his net a lot wider, though, and draws on lots of other ideas. Perhaps most obviously for his theme he references Ovid frequently. He also draws on old science fiction movies and on his narrator’s (or perhaps just “his”) family history among lots of other things that swirl around and cross-reference one another.
I have to say I found it a completely engaging book to read and I read it all in a day. I can imagine that it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea because it doesn’t flow or have a plot. Well, it does flow: it flows round and round in circles as it picks up ideas and, to change metaphor, knits them together.
I really liked it.
November 19, 2023
This is pitched as a gothic coming-of-age novel set in a isolated coastal village, but that’s only part of the story. In the parts of the book entitled ‘The North Shore’, the young narrator is at home alone during a storm. The next morning, walking on the beach, they encounter what at first seems like a dead man. He revives – albeit coughing up impossible quantities of seaweed, and apparently unable to speak – before undergoing a bizarre transformation. ‘The North Shore’ itself reminded me of several writers who combine a strong sense of a specific place and beautiful landscape writing with the uncanny: Lucy Wood, Tim Cooke, Gary Budden. But swathes of the book, notably the sections ‘Knotty Entrails’ and ‘Knapped Flint’, slip into a more conversational style of (perhaps) autofiction that’s more in line with something like Edward Parnell’s Ghostland. In these, the narrator finds the ‘North Shore’ manuscript among some old papers, many years later. Unable to reconcile the written version of events with what they remember, they reflect on this seemingly distorted memory with reference to stories, myths and art about transformation, thresholds, the vast unknown.
The North Shore deliberately plays into ideas about liminality and ‘the instability of that state we call reality’; nothing is fixed or certain. It’s a novel that reads like non-fiction, hard to categorise. It’s natural to assume the narrator is male (if only because the author is), but as far as I can tell, their gender is never stated. At one point they glimpse their own reflection in a dream, and the language is intentionally vague, as if they are aware of themselves as a cipher: ‘the face is unfamiliar and I am not sure if it is a boy or a girl that looks back at me.’ The narrator starts to read like a ghost in their own story. They are ephemeral while the ‘dead’ man becomes – literally – more solid, more permanent.
The only elements that didn’t work for me were those relating to the narrator’s relationship with a childhood friend known only as ‘Quill’. This whole strand seems unfinished, and particularly bothered me as The North Shore is otherwise such an effective portrait of a solitary person – it’s as though Tufnell felt obliged to give his character at least one friend, but Quill’s presence in the story adds nothing, with the few letters that pass between the two reading as rather mawkish. This aside, I found this book very interesting – its combination of haunting fiction and more rational analysis, the sense of a narrator dismantling their own narrative as they go along, is strangely spellbinding. And even after all this dissection, the story still retains a sense of mystery.
The North Shore deliberately plays into ideas about liminality and ‘the instability of that state we call reality’; nothing is fixed or certain. It’s a novel that reads like non-fiction, hard to categorise. It’s natural to assume the narrator is male (if only because the author is), but as far as I can tell, their gender is never stated. At one point they glimpse their own reflection in a dream, and the language is intentionally vague, as if they are aware of themselves as a cipher: ‘the face is unfamiliar and I am not sure if it is a boy or a girl that looks back at me.’ The narrator starts to read like a ghost in their own story. They are ephemeral while the ‘dead’ man becomes – literally – more solid, more permanent.
The only elements that didn’t work for me were those relating to the narrator’s relationship with a childhood friend known only as ‘Quill’. This whole strand seems unfinished, and particularly bothered me as The North Shore is otherwise such an effective portrait of a solitary person – it’s as though Tufnell felt obliged to give his character at least one friend, but Quill’s presence in the story adds nothing, with the few letters that pass between the two reading as rather mawkish. This aside, I found this book very interesting – its combination of haunting fiction and more rational analysis, the sense of a narrator dismantling their own narrative as they go along, is strangely spellbinding. And even after all this dissection, the story still retains a sense of mystery.
April 8, 2023
I'm not sure why but I loved this book.
It is a strange mix of magical realism, dreams, myths and even, perhaps, childhood memories warped by time.
The start of the book gives us an odd tale of a boy finding a naked man on the shore, seemingly washed up after a violent storm. The tale of this man becomes stranger and stranger until its conclusion.
The remainder of the book is the narrator wondering exactly what (if anything) he found the morning after the storm. It also encompasses other recollections of what has washed up on beaches and the use of plants as part of fairy stories and myths throughout the ages.
I spent a bit of time Googling the references to certain artworks and being amazed at how little I remember if actual sculptures and paintings to the reality. Primavera by Botticelli is an example of this where we remember the central figure but I had certainly forgotten the figures around her.
I love a book that challenges my perceptions of reality and this book has that in abundance. The writing is beautiful and conjures up landscapes seemingly without effort.
I would definitely recommend this book if you like something a little different. I also hope that the multi-talented Mr Tufnell writes more fiction.
Thanks to Netgalley for the chance to read this ARC.
It is a strange mix of magical realism, dreams, myths and even, perhaps, childhood memories warped by time.
The start of the book gives us an odd tale of a boy finding a naked man on the shore, seemingly washed up after a violent storm. The tale of this man becomes stranger and stranger until its conclusion.
The remainder of the book is the narrator wondering exactly what (if anything) he found the morning after the storm. It also encompasses other recollections of what has washed up on beaches and the use of plants as part of fairy stories and myths throughout the ages.
I spent a bit of time Googling the references to certain artworks and being amazed at how little I remember if actual sculptures and paintings to the reality. Primavera by Botticelli is an example of this where we remember the central figure but I had certainly forgotten the figures around her.
I love a book that challenges my perceptions of reality and this book has that in abundance. The writing is beautiful and conjures up landscapes seemingly without effort.
I would definitely recommend this book if you like something a little different. I also hope that the multi-talented Mr Tufnell writes more fiction.
Thanks to Netgalley for the chance to read this ARC.
March 29, 2023
On the first glance, The North Shore seemed like my perfect book: described as gothic, a mystery, with elements of folklore. Upon reading, however, Ben Tufnell's debut turned out to be something else entirely. It started promising and intriguing, but it soon morphed into a bunch of, although beautifully written, words that didn't add up to anything resembling a story. To my utter disappointment, I found it confusing and not at all connected to the mysterious man who came from the sea and ended up puking leaves and seaweed - the best bit of this book!
Having seen a few other reviews around, it might just be a Marmite kind of a novel, but I'm sad because I expected to love it and it was not what the synopsis promised. The middle section, when we return to our narrator, the coming-of-age element of the novel, and the seaweed man, got my hopes up again, only to quickly move into another part: philosophical, too cosmic for my liking and completely plotless.
The North Shore is a quick read and definitely an experience, but it was not for me. Alas! There's some stunning writing hidden in-between, but I would rather read more about the mysterious man who came from the sea. Thanks so much to Little Brown and NetGalley for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.
Having seen a few other reviews around, it might just be a Marmite kind of a novel, but I'm sad because I expected to love it and it was not what the synopsis promised. The middle section, when we return to our narrator, the coming-of-age element of the novel, and the seaweed man, got my hopes up again, only to quickly move into another part: philosophical, too cosmic for my liking and completely plotless.
The North Shore is a quick read and definitely an experience, but it was not for me. Alas! There's some stunning writing hidden in-between, but I would rather read more about the mysterious man who came from the sea. Thanks so much to Little Brown and NetGalley for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.
August 26, 2023
This was a quiet read, perfect for the terrific storms that hit northeast Ohio this weekend.
This novel is told in first person by a solitary man who grew up on a northern coast of England and became a botany illustrator. The story opens on the night a violent storm hits his small village and the narrator, a young teenager, is home alone, his mother having left to attend the death bed of her father. The boy finds something cast up onto the shore that he cannot make sense of.
This experience and watching a crew of scientists examining the carcass of a whale on that same shore creates an awareness in the young man of the transformations, mutations, and metamorphic processes in the natural world. The rest of the book is this man’s thoughts and observations on nature, art, literature, folk tales and shared myths, and the ways in which our environment shapes us.
This is a perfect book for a stormy day spent under s blanket reading and contemplating the world around us and artists’ attempt to capture it in different art forms.
Recommended.
This novel is told in first person by a solitary man who grew up on a northern coast of England and became a botany illustrator. The story opens on the night a violent storm hits his small village and the narrator, a young teenager, is home alone, his mother having left to attend the death bed of her father. The boy finds something cast up onto the shore that he cannot make sense of.
This experience and watching a crew of scientists examining the carcass of a whale on that same shore creates an awareness in the young man of the transformations, mutations, and metamorphic processes in the natural world. The rest of the book is this man’s thoughts and observations on nature, art, literature, folk tales and shared myths, and the ways in which our environment shapes us.
This is a perfect book for a stormy day spent under s blanket reading and contemplating the world around us and artists’ attempt to capture it in different art forms.
Recommended.
April 25, 2023
This novel took me by surprise. It is described as a gothic debut and yes, there is, especially at the beginning a gothic feel, but there is much more. Set in north Norfolk - a place I love -in the beginning we have the story of a young boy home alone during a major storm. In the growing darkness he goes down to the shingle beach and find a half naked man washed up on the shore, a man he at first believes to be dead. With great difficulty, he manages to get the man back to his home and from there the story gets stranger and darker. The story then moves on and our adult narrator - now an established botanical illustrator/artist - is trying to make sense of what happened to him as a boy, trying to find the truth behind the experience. This second part is made up of notes that he has made about metamorphosis. His mother translated classical texts and so our narrator know the works of Ovid and he relates the ancient myths, how humans changed into plants. He examines works of art by Botticelli and Hieronymus Bosch which depict the same changes. I had to google these to remind myself of the subject matter. He is looking for the connection between these stories and myths to the event that he thinks he remembers. And just as in the stories, humans transform into plants then this book also seems to transform as you read on - as he tries to discover if his memories are true. This is a difficult book to categorise as there is no real plot - what there is seems to transform and slip form one thing to another, it tells stories, it examines details. Above all the writing is beautiful and the description of the coast, the storm are breath-taking. I picked it up expecting one thing and it transformed into something different. very much like our narrator's memory.
October 15, 2023
I bought a copy of The North Shore to take with me to read on my recent trip to England, knowing that I would visit the eastern county of Norfolk for the first time in more than twenty years. Nearly twenty-five. It is a place that speaks to me of my childhood, because that is where we went once, twice or even three times a year during school holidays. Visiting this year for the first time with my wife, it was amazing how many times I said ‘we stayed in that cottage for a week’. So many different week-long holiday homes. So many memories from a lost past.
Although The North Shore doesn’t describe itself a novel set in Norfolk, to anyone who knows the place, it clearly is. To me the countless childhood memories it brought back, worked well with the coming of age theme of the book and its narrator.
To give you a real sense of place, I found this section just twelve pages in, which spoke so clearly of the North Norfolk coast:
Lovely use of words like numinous and liminal here, words you don’t hear everyday but suggesting something that requires you to look hard for the right words to describe its unusual nature.
This is a tale of the supernatural, but it still sticks close to the possible. A young man is left at home while his mother goes to visit her sick husband. While she is away a huge storm passes over and all the electricity is lost. In the aftermath of the storm the boy wanders down to the shingle beach to see what has been washed up. He finds the dead body of a man, lying awkwardly in a low hollow in the shingle. The boy is convinced that he is dead until the body begins to cough and convulse.
The boy is then faced with multiple dilemmas. He cannot leave the man half-drowned on the beach, and nor is he close enough to go for help, fearing it might be too late. In the end he has to shoulder and half-carry the man to his empty home. Try to warm him and revive him before going for help. All the time we are puzzled by the origins of the stranger and how he got there. Was a boat shipwrecked in the storm, or did he fall from a boat far out at sea? The boy gets him home and finds dry clothes, but the man is uncomprehending at first, then:
The section ends abruptly and we begin a forty-page digression about Shakespeare and The Tempest, Ovid, art in London’s National Gallery and Rome’s Villa Borghese. Paintings and sculpture of Apollo and Daphne as she transforms into a tree. Metamorphosis from man to tree will haunt the pages. All these elements bring the narrator back to his father, whom he describes beautifully:
In a section called Liminal Tufnell describes a feature of the North Norfolk coast, the fact that many small villages were once thriving coastal ports, but are now miles inland. He mentions the strange objects that can be disgorged from the thick mud; artefacts, clay pipes, bones, blades, teeth, leather, amber and nails.
And just as suddenly you are back with the young man and his mysterious visitor. Jack from the pub arrives to assess the situation, but can offer no practical help. He’s worried that the man might be a Russian. The drowned man is still coughing up leaves and seaweed.
Section IV is called Knapped Flint, that familiar Norfolk building material, and we are back with transformations and Ovid. Also back to school days for the narrator and memories of a school project to list the species, plants and bugs to be found on the shore, in the marsh and finally up in the woods. This is the narrator’s first experience of what will become his calling and profession – the expert drawing of plants.
The final short section is calledAriel, echoing that earlier theme of The Tempest, and moving forward several years as the boy has become a man and returns to the North Shore.
This is a lovely book that deserves more accolades. Its evocation of place is perfect, and even the reflections on the art of other eras adds a special element. The old man from the sea, of which I have only said a little, adds an element of the magical or supernatural which might not be to every taste. For me it all combines to capture the magic of a place I love.
Although The North Shore doesn’t describe itself a novel set in Norfolk, to anyone who knows the place, it clearly is. To me the countless childhood memories it brought back, worked well with the coming of age theme of the book and its narrator.
To give you a real sense of place, I found this section just twelve pages in, which spoke so clearly of the North Norfolk coast:
I loved that place even if, in the end, I was eager and ready to get away and to see what else there was in the world. Most of all I loved the marshes, those strange, wide, empty, cloud-vaulted places. The marshes are a special place, a world unto themselves, neither sea nor land but somewhere in between. That liminality is not merely physical, a border between the land and the water. There is something numinous there, a sense that the boundaries between dimensions are wafer thin and might be torn as easily as a sheet of rice paper. If you feel it, if you are attentive; the rents in the fabric of space or even time that can happen at any moment. The burnished fox glimpsed slipping quietly through a hedge might be passing from one world to another. Just as the curious magpie is there in the corner of your eye but as you turn to look and say, Hello, Mister Magpie, he has vanished, is already somewhere else. He regards you confidently from a fence post, head cocked, as if wondering whether to engage you in conversation. The eerie noises and calls drifting on the wind that one cannot locate the source of. The sense that it is all shifting. The scrapes and ponds that move from season to season, as if possessed of a queer an unruly intelligence. The stands of reeds that grow and shrink and grow again. The huge flocks of birds that come and go. In that border zone the mud – the very land itself – is always in motion, though to the naked eye it is as still as stone.
Lovely use of words like numinous and liminal here, words you don’t hear everyday but suggesting something that requires you to look hard for the right words to describe its unusual nature.
This is a tale of the supernatural, but it still sticks close to the possible. A young man is left at home while his mother goes to visit her sick husband. While she is away a huge storm passes over and all the electricity is lost. In the aftermath of the storm the boy wanders down to the shingle beach to see what has been washed up. He finds the dead body of a man, lying awkwardly in a low hollow in the shingle. The boy is convinced that he is dead until the body begins to cough and convulse.
I thought he was about to vomit but no, it was a cough, an attempt to expel the blockage in his throat. And then it came up, a coil of seaweed, greasy with phlegm. He coughed the lumpish mass free, and it hung by its tail from his lips. He coughed again and took hold of it and pulled, like a conjurer who produces an endless chain of handkerchiefs from a pocket, tugged a grotesquely long shank of tangles up and out and with a distraught groan cast it onto the shingle.
The boy is then faced with multiple dilemmas. He cannot leave the man half-drowned on the beach, and nor is he close enough to go for help, fearing it might be too late. In the end he has to shoulder and half-carry the man to his empty home. Try to warm him and revive him before going for help. All the time we are puzzled by the origins of the stranger and how he got there. Was a boat shipwrecked in the storm, or did he fall from a boat far out at sea? The boy gets him home and finds dry clothes, but the man is uncomprehending at first, then:
He pulled off his wet clothes wearily and stiffly, and with a great deal of huffing and puffing and pausing for rest, he put Father’s dry clothes on. I watched him carefully. He didn’t hide from me and I couldn’t help but see and be fascinated. His body was old but still tautly muscled, tendons bunched like coils of old rope, weathered and bent like a gnarled tree. His limbs were blotched with cold, tracked with scars and densely ornamented with extraordinary tattoos.
On his arms I could see anchors, stars, daggers, dice, birds, and many other things besides, including crude writing and cursive script, none of which was intelligible. Winding in and around the mass of symbols was a great writhing of vines and roots. His hands were decorated too, even the knuckles – which bore a sequence of letters that didn’t resolve into any words that I knew – the flaps of skin between his fingers, each with crude letters, crosses, stars and suchlike. A spider’s web articulated each elbow.
The section ends abruptly and we begin a forty-page digression about Shakespeare and The Tempest, Ovid, art in London’s National Gallery and Rome’s Villa Borghese. Paintings and sculpture of Apollo and Daphne as she transforms into a tree. Metamorphosis from man to tree will haunt the pages. All these elements bring the narrator back to his father, whom he describes beautifully:
Father was a man of contradictions. Tall and thin and, in my mind’s eye, always grey haired, his skin browned by the sun. His face was like the prow of a boat, angular and impressive and pleasingly weathered. He ran a second-hand bookshop and read voraciously, but would have described himself as neither cerebral nor intellectual, rather as an outdoorsman and a craftsman. While he loved literature and regarded his shop with its teetering mountains of battered books as a kind of holy sanctuary, Father found an honest contentment in taking a boat out to fish or setting off to forage in the woods for wild mushrooms, or quietly whittling and sanding in his untidy workshop behind the house. Both places, bookshop and workshop, betrayed a mind that was unable to settle in one place, piled high as they were with books, magazines, tools and ‘useful things’. His desk at the shop and his workbench at home were both heaped with sheets of paper. There were invoices and receipts but more than anything there were endless lists: of projects in mind, things to do and places to go. Plans and schemes. He was always dreaming up a new project: a table, a chicken run, a boat that he would build himself, the rescue and revival of an old cart or derelict tractor, the fashioning of new handles for ancient axes, spades and mattocks. His lack of focus enraged Mother, always so methodical, but it enchanted her too. Father could be good company with his endless schemes and ambitions, and tales culled from the many books he ploughed through while sitting alone in the quiet little bookshop, but he could also be taciturn and remote. He often retreated inside himself, especially at home.
In a section called Liminal Tufnell describes a feature of the North Norfolk coast, the fact that many small villages were once thriving coastal ports, but are now miles inland. He mentions the strange objects that can be disgorged from the thick mud; artefacts, clay pipes, bones, blades, teeth, leather, amber and nails.
Perhaps this is why ghost tales are so prevalent along this coast, because ghosts are memories that exist neither in this world nor that. Sometimes they come to us not as spooks but as objects, artefacts, remainings. The uncanny shifting of the land reveals secrets, lets us see back into the past, just as from the sandy cliffs at Cranmer a few years ago the skeleton of a huge mammoth emerged, as perfectly preserves as can be.
And just as suddenly you are back with the young man and his mysterious visitor. Jack from the pub arrives to assess the situation, but can offer no practical help. He’s worried that the man might be a Russian. The drowned man is still coughing up leaves and seaweed.
Section IV is called Knapped Flint, that familiar Norfolk building material, and we are back with transformations and Ovid. Also back to school days for the narrator and memories of a school project to list the species, plants and bugs to be found on the shore, in the marsh and finally up in the woods. This is the narrator’s first experience of what will become his calling and profession – the expert drawing of plants.
The final short section is calledAriel, echoing that earlier theme of The Tempest, and moving forward several years as the boy has become a man and returns to the North Shore.
When people asked me where I came from I would hesitate to answer; it didn’t seem quite right to name the city in which I then lived. I knew that if you were to cut me open I would bleed salt water, marsh seep, clay creep and black mud. Inside me you would find shingle, silt and seashells, lumps of driftwood instead of bones, seaweed, tangles of old rope and knots of twine for guts and nerves, nodules of flint, pine cones and acorns, and sprays of forget-me-nots as blue as the sky, grasses, reeds, loosestrife and knapweed. For I am of that place, and always will be.
This is a lovely book that deserves more accolades. Its evocation of place is perfect, and even the reflections on the art of other eras adds a special element. The old man from the sea, of which I have only said a little, adds an element of the magical or supernatural which might not be to every taste. For me it all combines to capture the magic of a place I love.
June 24, 2023
Beautifully written and highly descriptive. You can almost feel the storm as it builds and swells and finally makes its way to shore. You can almost feel the cold. Parts of it did feel like a review for a gallery or artist in the Guardians culture section of the weekend magazine, but I think it all starts to make sense. Perhaps the book was too clever for me, perhaps I didn’t get the metaphors and symbolism, but that doesn’t make it a bad book or that I can’t appreciate the writing and descriptions of marshes and woods and plants. So many plants, but that’s part of the story. 🌳🌳🐋🌬️🌊
June 1, 2023
This book is most decidedly not to be listed alongside Max Porter.
The first part of this book is a beautifully imagined storm which causes the narrator to explore the coast and make a momentous discovery. Unfortunately the second part goes off into some tedious essay about storms to display the author's erudite art education and knowledge with the odd cross reference to the first part. The third part resumes the story but I had lost all interest by then as there was no story.
The first part of this book is a beautifully imagined storm which causes the narrator to explore the coast and make a momentous discovery. Unfortunately the second part goes off into some tedious essay about storms to display the author's erudite art education and knowledge with the odd cross reference to the first part. The third part resumes the story but I had lost all interest by then as there was no story.
August 28, 2023
Echoes. Why do I hoard these stories, and the artworks that show them?
Perhaps it is because they are all more or less versions - or variations - of this story. My story. Or is it that the tale is a kind of commentary on the artworks and stories? They are echoes of each other, perhaps. Or not exactly echoes, for an echo comes after the fact, but more like premonitions. Stories from the past that reflect upon the present.
In gathering together all this material, what did I learn? What did I discover? That, as Heraclitus tells us, we may not step into the same river twice. That all things, be they objects, people or places, are in flux and that this is an unending process. That one cannot resist this unending process but must go along with it, even embrace it. For why might not a stone become a bird, a leaf become a bee, a tree become a man, or vice versa?
A book about liminality and metamorphosis which itself spreads across the boundaries between fact, fiction, and outright fantasy and which transforms from what is initially a gothic style mystery to musings in art.
The book opens with a section (“North Shore”) set on the day of a ferocious storm. The first party narrator who still (despite being a young adult) lives with his mother between heathlands and salt marshes, is alone during the storm as his mother is visiting his dying grandfather. The next morning, venturing out, into an eerily deserted village to see what damage has been caused, he finds what he initially thinks is a dead body in the beach. To his shock the man turns out to be alive although incapable of communication and retching up seaweed. He drags the man back to his house where he continues to cough up vegetal matter.
The novel then shifts forwards in time, in “Knotty Entrails”, the narrator, now a well-known botanical illustrator and living away from his childhood home, muses on a number of interrelated subjects including: thresholds, liminality, metamorphosis (and Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”), mermaids, translation (his mother’s profession), Botticelli’s La Primavera, flux, flood, “The Tempest”. The North Sea setting and the way it prompts a series of interlinked ideas is partly reminiscent of Sebald but I think it would be safer to say both draw in the same inspiration as this writing is stylistically different and perhaps more reminiscent of the clear delineations of a Sagasti than the wandering prose of Sebald.
We then return to the North Shore account of the discovery of the man - which are set in somewhere which is almost but not quite Norfolk (Kings Eye, North Witch, Cranmer, a railway almost like the Poppy Line but terminating much nearer the coast) and his either disappearance of transformation to a tree.
In the next section “Knapped Flint” we come to realise the “North Shore” sections are a diary/journal the narrator discovers when older. And we then return to the Sagasitan sections - which are increasingly pre-occupied with the idea of humans transforming into plants - drawing from Greek legend through to classic 50s science fiction films, Hieronymus Bosch, Pinocchio, Mandrakes. The rather fantastical story the journal tells matches the narrator’s vegetal metamorphosis musings more than they do his current more prosaic memories of the events of the storm. This section ends as “Knotty Entrails” starts with musings on “The Tempest”
A final section draws the threads together as the narrator decides to return to the village of his youth.
Overall I found this an absolutely fascinating novel – a book I think I would have naturally really enjoyed but one where my enjoyment was enhanced by its evocative setting in my favourite part of the world.
My thanks to Little Brown UK for an ARC via NetGalley
You don’t pass through this land on the way to anywhere else. It is, in a very literal sense, the end of the road. That road brings you to the sea and then the only way on is to follow it north as it curves around the edge of the land, with the marshes, shingle banks and water to your right, the heaths, woods and fields rolling gently to the left, and the endless sky above and beyond. Sooner or later that road comes to an end as well, and then there is nothing..
On the North Shore it can feel that Scandinavia, or even the white void of the Arctic, must be closer than our capital city (which lies more than one hundred miles to the south in what is, to all intents and purposes, another world). The winds that bring the cold air in from the sea scour the land relentlessly. It often feels a great deal colder than the thermometer says it is. The sense of space, of vastness, is strong. It makes you feel small. At times it can be overwhelming.
In long winters the countryside presents a desolate prospect. When the trees have been stripped of their leaves and the fields have been turned over, bare of anything growing, it looks and feels like a hard land. Yet this bleakness has its own rare beauty. The famously big skies, more expansive here than almost anywhere else in this realm, are piled high with cathedrals of cloud. I say again, it is bleak, but it is brutally beautiful. I love it.
Yet in the summer, when the weather is good, it is another place completely. When the fields are full of golden corn, beet tops and lavender, and the hedges are thick with foamy heads of cow parsley, and the sun is shining, the land glows as if it is lit from within. That is God’s light, on God’s land, they used to say. Then people travel here from afar to witness this holy beauty. They come to swim in the sea and walk along the fading shore – on sand and shingle – and to explore the ruined churches and castles, the signs of a rich and complex past. Walkers and bird watchers love the wide marshes that are policed by fleet and nimble marsh harriers and home to an extraordinary avian miscellany: terns, warblers, lapwings, redshanks, pied avocets and the mysterious bittern, and even the gadwalls, goldeneyes and pintails that travel thousands of miles to this very stretch of coast, which for them is a kind of paradise.
Some say that it is a flat land, but they are really speaking of the fens, which are to the north-west, or the counties inland to the west. In fact, this is rolling country, cut across by little roads, much wooded. Villages crouch for shelter in dips and valleys, shadowed by ancient oaks. The people are tough and with a reputation for being distrustful of authority. On the coast they are fishermen, both for the haddock and mackerel that live in great numbers out in the deep sea, and for the renowned crabs and lobsters that live closer to the shore, which they catch from little boats using cunning basket traps. Inland they are farmers, growing oats, barley, wheat and corn, sugar beets and potatoes, and husbanding hardy cattle. There are many muddy pig farms. There is an unusual proliferation of both churches and public houses, which perhaps says something about the character of the people and the land in which they live, of the need for spiritual reassurance and a warm hearth where they can huddle together while the wind blows; bound by song and prayer and beer.
As the North Sea embraces this land, the storms that are visited upon us are uncommonly severe. High winds carry sea spray far in from the great emptiness, on air chilled by Arctic currents. Because of this, the people who live on the North Shore are hardy and ready. We build our houses and churches from flint, one of the hardest stones. Split a flint open and you might find beautiful crystals nestled among the opaque and milky planes. Split another and the shards that fall away will make good blades, unbelievably sharp if also fragile
June 18, 2023
Compelling and completely satisfying novel. Not a straightforward narrative, or truly a gothic novel, if one is looking for a linear plot line, but a complexly detailed exploration of liminality and the role liminality plays in transformation and our own evolution as fully developed humans.
The novel opens with a ferocious storm, a boy home alone while is mother is away tending a dying grandfather, and the discovery of a drowned man on a beach. Then the novel shifts to the musings on art, metamorphosis, translation, and myth by the now adult narrator, before returning to the stormy setting from the narrator's youth. The old man becomes a tree, or perhaps he simply disappears as no one else seems to think the tree remarkable. The grandfather dies, and this reader wonders abut the emotional and psychological overlap between the events and the storm.
Next we learn that the entire gothic story is found in an old journal uncovered from the narrator's childhood. More musings on art, on myth and the transformation of humans into plants and plants into humans; also on the transformation of memory, how the wilder, more imaginative and more mythical impressions of childhood become subsumed under a more placid exterior that allows us to function in the world.
My impression is that the author is musing on the common thread between art, literature and the psyche as well as the way we use stories to provide meaning to our lives. In fact, it feels as he is attempting to use words and ideas in the same way an artist uses brushstrokes to build depth and meaning in a painting. He is taking something that appears scattered and building it methodically into something that harbors hidden depths. The alternating sections, the jumping around between magical realism and practical reality, art, movies, literature, human interaction -- all of this is a rather deft exploration of the knotty bits that make up understanding. Fascinating and engrossing, a novel worth returning to.
The novel opens with a ferocious storm, a boy home alone while is mother is away tending a dying grandfather, and the discovery of a drowned man on a beach. Then the novel shifts to the musings on art, metamorphosis, translation, and myth by the now adult narrator, before returning to the stormy setting from the narrator's youth. The old man becomes a tree, or perhaps he simply disappears as no one else seems to think the tree remarkable. The grandfather dies, and this reader wonders abut the emotional and psychological overlap between the events and the storm.
Next we learn that the entire gothic story is found in an old journal uncovered from the narrator's childhood. More musings on art, on myth and the transformation of humans into plants and plants into humans; also on the transformation of memory, how the wilder, more imaginative and more mythical impressions of childhood become subsumed under a more placid exterior that allows us to function in the world.
My impression is that the author is musing on the common thread between art, literature and the psyche as well as the way we use stories to provide meaning to our lives. In fact, it feels as he is attempting to use words and ideas in the same way an artist uses brushstrokes to build depth and meaning in a painting. He is taking something that appears scattered and building it methodically into something that harbors hidden depths. The alternating sections, the jumping around between magical realism and practical reality, art, movies, literature, human interaction -- all of this is a rather deft exploration of the knotty bits that make up understanding. Fascinating and engrossing, a novel worth returning to.
March 27, 2023
I love mythology and was drawn to The North Shore after reading Kiran Millwood Hargrave's description of it as a "a wrack-like tangle of myth, mystery and the power of the sea and its stories." Unfortunately the "wrack-like tangle" well describes the lack of plot which made this book feel longer than it is.
I would have persisted but the writing detracted, rather clichéd and clunky. I also hate the old adage "show don't tell", but it exists for books like this. There's an overuse of "it felt" throughout, particularly on the first page: "it felt like dusk ... Even then, it felt like the end of the day." An overuse of similes: "The heavy clouds hung above like dark thoughts. The light was silvery and flickered like a faulty bulb." And so much redundant language: "looking back", "looking out ... " "looking east and north", "I could see everything", "I recalled". When I gave up, around halfway, I opened at some random pages ahead to check it wasn't just the beginning. I'll do it now. P. 180: "Looking out across the wide landscape it was as if I were airborne again. Airy. That old feeling. The light was bright and the air was clear, just as it was when I recalled that place and that view out to the ocean." I'm surprised a lot of this wasn't edited out. Just show us what you're looking at. We understand that you're the one doing the looking, first-person narrator! Not to mention clichés: "the air filled with petrichor, the scent of wet earth". While reading I had the feeling that the author set out to contrive a masterpiece and write lyrical prose. I think that this was, above all, where the book didn't work for me.
I am grateful to the publishers for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
I would have persisted but the writing detracted, rather clichéd and clunky. I also hate the old adage "show don't tell", but it exists for books like this. There's an overuse of "it felt" throughout, particularly on the first page: "it felt like dusk ... Even then, it felt like the end of the day." An overuse of similes: "The heavy clouds hung above like dark thoughts. The light was silvery and flickered like a faulty bulb." And so much redundant language: "looking back", "looking out ... " "looking east and north", "I could see everything", "I recalled". When I gave up, around halfway, I opened at some random pages ahead to check it wasn't just the beginning. I'll do it now. P. 180: "Looking out across the wide landscape it was as if I were airborne again. Airy. That old feeling. The light was bright and the air was clear, just as it was when I recalled that place and that view out to the ocean." I'm surprised a lot of this wasn't edited out. Just show us what you're looking at. We understand that you're the one doing the looking, first-person narrator! Not to mention clichés: "the air filled with petrichor, the scent of wet earth". While reading I had the feeling that the author set out to contrive a masterpiece and write lyrical prose. I think that this was, above all, where the book didn't work for me.
I am grateful to the publishers for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
May 19, 2023
I often recommend books to my friends, and have given away many copies of my favourites, but this is the first time I’ve felt drawn to publicly share a review.
Why does Ben Tufnell’s debut novel make me want to do this?
I think it could be because it is a beautiful book, although the beauty it describes is bleak and dark, and underpinned by a lush, damp, unsettling, organic life-force and the understated tale of a life.
It also could be because it gently riffs on great things like death, and the sea, and myths, and history of place, but does it lightly, with wispy cameos from Marcus Aurelius, Kurt Vonnegut and The Thing from Another World.
I enjoy that it develops interesting ideas, like how paintings can be more true than photographs through the ‘compromise of accuracy.’
The North Shore is a nest of essays within a story, within another story. Quite a feat for such a short novel.
It is a little gem, and I heartily recommend it to you.
Why does Ben Tufnell’s debut novel make me want to do this?
I think it could be because it is a beautiful book, although the beauty it describes is bleak and dark, and underpinned by a lush, damp, unsettling, organic life-force and the understated tale of a life.
It also could be because it gently riffs on great things like death, and the sea, and myths, and history of place, but does it lightly, with wispy cameos from Marcus Aurelius, Kurt Vonnegut and The Thing from Another World.
I enjoy that it develops interesting ideas, like how paintings can be more true than photographs through the ‘compromise of accuracy.’
The North Shore is a nest of essays within a story, within another story. Quite a feat for such a short novel.
It is a little gem, and I heartily recommend it to you.
April 28, 2023
‘You don’t pass through this land on the way to anywhere else’ in every sense.
A glorious story which draws you in….to a wild landscape of folklore and storm, of stories of Ovid and Shakespeare’s Tempest. A ferocious storm batters this North Norfolk shore in that liminal place where land and sky meet, where sea and storm gather in the salt marshes. He lives there.
A terrifying discovery and it’s aftermath live on with him into adulthood. His love of that Landscape give him a profession. And will he eventually return to that wild place?
Told through the eyes of a young boy, as he shifts between adolescence and myth into adult remembering. This is language and legend that will want to read and reread and savour and remember. It will stay with you.
Turn off the clocks. Lock all the doors. Read this wonderful take straight through.
A glorious story which draws you in….to a wild landscape of folklore and storm, of stories of Ovid and Shakespeare’s Tempest. A ferocious storm batters this North Norfolk shore in that liminal place where land and sky meet, where sea and storm gather in the salt marshes. He lives there.
A terrifying discovery and it’s aftermath live on with him into adulthood. His love of that Landscape give him a profession. And will he eventually return to that wild place?
Told through the eyes of a young boy, as he shifts between adolescence and myth into adult remembering. This is language and legend that will want to read and reread and savour and remember. It will stay with you.
Turn off the clocks. Lock all the doors. Read this wonderful take straight through.
June 7, 2023
A wild storm batters the coast . Left alone whilst his mother spends time with her father as he lays dying. He tries to keep the weather out. Next morning whilst examining the damage to the house & roundabout he sees something on the beach. It is a mystery how he got there -if only half alive. It is a struggle to get him back to the house. Enroute & inside the house he vomits a vast amount of sea life. The rest of the book deals with the narrator trying to make sense of what he saw.
Looking at other reviews, there are many who loved this book. Sadly I'm not one of them. The first part was atmospheric, creepy & well described. After that I struggled to find something that really held this story together but I'm afraid it eluded me- I did love the cover though! Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for letting me read & review this strange book.
Looking at other reviews, there are many who loved this book. Sadly I'm not one of them. The first part was atmospheric, creepy & well described. After that I struggled to find something that really held this story together but I'm afraid it eluded me- I did love the cover though! Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for letting me read & review this strange book.
April 20, 2023
A boy discovers a body on a Norfolk beach in the aftermath of a storm that has taken down trees, power lines and all sense of security. At first the man seems dead but, when the boy turns him over, a string of murky seaweed pours from his belly.
This could be the start of a mystery thriller, but the man never speaks and we don’t discover where he came from. You could call it a mysticalery as, before we’re told how things get worse, there’s a section of fragments that read as part myth, part memoir, about the merging of land and sea, and of plant and animal life.
It’s an easy read, with some lovely sentences, and the concept lingers in the mind, but don’t come to The North Shore for the plot.
This could be the start of a mystery thriller, but the man never speaks and we don’t discover where he came from. You could call it a mysticalery as, before we’re told how things get worse, there’s a section of fragments that read as part myth, part memoir, about the merging of land and sea, and of plant and animal life.
It’s an easy read, with some lovely sentences, and the concept lingers in the mind, but don’t come to The North Shore for the plot.
April 27, 2023
"The North Shore" by Ben Tufnell is definitely going to divide readers into one of two camps: those who love it and those who just don't get it. I'm in the first camp (not that I totally get it). I think it has to be a book that you are in the mood to read, and luckily for me, I was and breezed through it. Although not named, I suspect that the book is set in North Norfolk, an area of the UK I am very quickly growing to love. It is very other worldy and full of local tales and legends, all of which come out in this book. I preferred the traditional narrative sections but could put up with the other sections as they added to the ambience of the book. A brilliant first novel.
June 30, 2023
I wanted to love this book and, like others, found the initial chapter engrossing and intriguing, but all semblance of structure and plot soon get lost in a scrapbook of various art references addressed in tedious detail.
Even glossing over the awkward parallels to a bestseller from the main character being a reclusive child in the marsh who illustrates nature books, this book showed flashes of brilliance that became mired in the authors own passions and failed to deliver more than a few chapters worth of actual storytelling.
Even glossing over the awkward parallels to a bestseller from the main character being a reclusive child in the marsh who illustrates nature books, this book showed flashes of brilliance that became mired in the authors own passions and failed to deliver more than a few chapters worth of actual storytelling.
April 17, 2024
A wonderful meditation of a novel infused with memoir-esque reflection, but teeming with gothic, folkish fiction. An ode to humanity’s relationship with nature and the spiralling becoming-with of human and nonhuman bodies and liminal sea and landscapes of time. The attention to the narrative power and potential of art - in literature, paintings, sculptures, and film - are achieved exquisitely. The descriptions of paintings, in particular, are so incredibly vivid. I’ve added many works to my own list of research as a result of this book.
May 15, 2023
A young man, left on his own during a storm of biblical proportions, meets a strange figure who haunts him throughout his life. The book follows him in adult life as he tries to make sense of events and finds clues in art, literature and movies.
I adored this book and would highly recommend it. The story jumps between dream-like prose to beautifully written descriptions of art and re-tellings of classical literature. All in all very thought-provoking and delightful read.
I adored this book and would highly recommend it. The story jumps between dream-like prose to beautifully written descriptions of art and re-tellings of classical literature. All in all very thought-provoking and delightful read.
October 3, 2023
A good debut novel from an author who is already finding his voice. I enjoyed the forays from the fiction into the art world and back again. It reminded me of Road to Oxiana with Robert Byron who had a wonderful insight into architecture. However that is a travel book and this story has a postmodern metaphysical dimension, perhaps with a nod to W G Sebald. Comparisons are inevitable with any book, however this novel is also unique and worthy of attention.
April 12, 2023
This isn't the sort of book that would normally grab me, it felt quite esoteric and I'm not sure I understood all of it but I loved it. What I took from it was reflections on the interconnectedness of people and nature, and the fragility of both. It also centred the place it was set - North Norfolk - with vivid descriptions of that beautiful setting. The writing was beautiful too, almost lyrical.
June 14, 2023
A novel not-really-a-novel, I really really liked this one. I'm a sucker for meandering back stories with very little plot; love a vivid and colour-infused natural setting; get inspired by peculiarities of subjects that I know very little about. All boxes ticked! I raced through it but I think there will be plenty who wonder why...
June 4, 2024
Enthralled by the tensions and mystery of the initial story (even while uncertain of the sex of the narrator) I thereafter found the random snippets dislocating disappointing and disjointed. Excellent on the nature of the East Anglian coast; an area I much love, and thought-provoking as to memories of place and childhood-experienced incidents but felt a little self-indulgent.
March 5, 2023
Rounding up to three stars.
Very much a "it's not you, it's me" book, because I just didn't quite get what was happening.
The beginning was interesting, but at some point it lost me, and despite reading to the end, I can't say I understood it.
Very much a "it's not you, it's me" book, because I just didn't quite get what was happening.
The beginning was interesting, but at some point it lost me, and despite reading to the end, I can't say I understood it.
June 2, 2023
Fascinating. Part horror fiction, part art history, part botany, part mythology, with geology and the nature of memory thrown in for good measure.
A quick read, but one you'll be thinking about for days.
A quick read, but one you'll be thinking about for days.
August 21, 2023
I think there is the makings of a great book here. I wish the author has stuck to the story of the found man and incorporated the marginalia of the two other sections into the main story. In the end, I found this book offered only a hint of what it might have been.
February 23, 2024
Eeery, long meanderings about literature and nature with something spooky behind it.
June 30, 2024
Set on the Norfolk coast, where I walked last month, but this novel's description of the landscape slightly disappointed me and the strange tale didn't really grab me.
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