New Books In Literature

Cornwall, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was best known for its smuggling. The combination of an insular and impoverished countryside, a rugged coastline characterized by numerous inlets and coves, and price hikes caused by the ongoing wars between Britain and France—played out in high tariffs and embargoes—created the perfect conditions for people desperate to make a living to defy what they saw as an unfair law. Over the years, those same characteristics have appealed to novelists from Daphne du Maurier to the present day. The Sea Child (Ballantine, 2026)—which takes place in an isolated village in Cornwall, although on a river leading to the sea rather than the coastline itself—certainly dips into the long and contentious struggle between Cornish villagers and the British Crown. But at the heart of the story we find Isabel Henley, a young woman who, as a child of four, was plucked from the sea with no knowledge of her parents or her home. Adopted by local landlords, Isabel has grown up, move