Category: Reviews

Book Review – Seascraper by Benjamin Wood

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About the Book

Thomas lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandpa’s trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey, gloomy beach and scrape for shrimp, spending the afternoon selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and scum, pining for Joan Wyeth down the street, and rehearsing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but it remains a private dream.

When a striking visitor turns up, bringing the promise of Hollywood glamour, Thomas is shaken from the drudgery of his days and begins to see a different future. But how much of what the American claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas?

Haunting and timeless, this is the story of a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows.

Format: Hardback (176 pages) Publisher: Viking
Publication date: 17th July 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

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My Review

Seascraper, winner of the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2026, is a book that simply oozes atmosphere. Although set in the early 1960s, it has a timeless quality.

Twenty-year old Thomas scrapes for shrimps in the same way his grandfather did before him, painstakingly with horse and cart, often with little to show for it at the end of a session. It’s tough, grimy, soul-destroying work. We get the gritty details of his life: the ingrown toenails, the reek of sweat, fish guts and horse dung, the salt-encrusted clothing. But there are lovely touches too such as Thomas’s tender care for his horse.

Thomas’s days are governed by the rhythm of the tides and by the weather. He navigates the potentially treacherous, shifting sands by a combination of instinct and memory. Most other shankers have switched to motor rigs but Thomas hasn’t the funds to buy one even if he wanted to. Instead by necessity he remains ‘steadfast to the old ways’.

A sense of being trapped permeates the novel.Thomas’s mother gave birth to him out of wedlock and has been ostracised by the community as a result, albeit unfairly. Her life is one of unending domestic chores with only the odd night out providing fleeting opportunities for company. Thomas harbours ambitions to be a folk musician but lacks the confidence even to tell his mother that he owns a guitar, let alone to perform in public. Instead he keeps his guitar hidden away in the stable, practising in secret.

Then, out of nowhere, the possibility of a different future appears in the shape of Edgar Acheson, a Hollywood movie director with a dream of his own, namely to restore his reputation by directing a film adaptation of a cherished rather otherwordly book. He believes that Thomas’s stretch of beach is the perfect location. ‘It’s sort of funny… I feel I’ve got the strongest sense of what this beach could give the picture. There’s a mood out here – it’s absolutely right. I mean it’s like I’ve been out here before.’

He offers what to Thomas is a life-changing sum of money if he will take him out on the beach. Edgar’s exuberance overcomes any misgivings Thomas may have; he knows what dangers lie out there. It turns out he’s right to have been wary because what he experiences that night is an uncanny combination of distorted version of reality and wish fulfillment. Eventually illusions are shattered but there’s also a tantalising glimpse of the possibility of a different future.

I’m not quite sure how the author managed to capture so much in so few pages but he did, brilliantly. Seascraper has a quiet intensity that is completely mesmerising and is fully deserving of all the plaudits it has received.

In three words: Atmospheric, immersive, poignant
Try something similar: Clear by Carys Davies

About the Author

Benjamin Wood was born in 1981 and grew up in Merseyside. Seascraper is his fifth novel. His previous works have been shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Book Prize, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the RSL Encore Award, the CWA Gold Dagger Award and the European Union Prize for Literature. In 2014, he won France’s Prix du roman Fnac. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at King’s College London, and lives in Surrey with his wife and sons.

Connect with Benjamin
Website

#WWWWednesday – 8th April 2026

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Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

What I’m Currently Reading

Paper Sisters by Rachel Canwell (Northodox Press)

Lincolnshire, 1914. As the First World War approaches, three women are living, trapped between the unforgiving marsh, the wide, relentless river, and the isolation of the fen.

Their lives are held fast by profound grief, haunted by the spectres of the past. Trapped by the looming presence and eerie stillness of a hospital that has never admitted a single patient.

Eleanor longs to escape. To make a life with the man she loves, leaving her sister, and all her ghosts behind. Clara’s marriage is crumbling and violent and she yearns for peace and security for both herself and her innocent children. Meanwhile, Lily, a formidable force of will, stands resolute against the relentless tide of change. She will stop at nothing, no matter the devastating cost, to ensure that life, and her family, remain frozen in an unyielding embrace of the past.

A Far-flung Life by M. L. Stedman (Doubleday)

Outback Western Australia, 1958. For generations, the MacBrides have lived on a remote sheep station, Meredith Downs. A million arid acres, it’s an ocean of land, where the weather is a capricious god, and time still roams untamed.

One ordinary day, on a lonely road, under the unending blue sky, patriarch Phil MacBride swerves to avoid a kangaroo. In seconds the lives of the entire MacBride family are shattered.

Instead of leaving wounds to heal, Fate comes for them yet again, in a twist of consequences that will cause one of them to lose their life, and another to sacrifice theirs for the sake of an innocent child.

Matt, the youngest MacBride, is plunged into a moral and emotional journey for which there is no map, no guide, as he is forced to choose between love and duty, sacrifice and happiness.

Dark is the Morning by Rupert Thomson (Apollo via NetGalley)

Sometimes love isn’t where you belong

In a small town in the Abruzzo region of Italy, Gino, a troubled young man, realises that his childhood sweetheart Franca can give his life the happiness and stability he needs. They seem made for each other, and move to a remote house in the countryside. Franca soon gives birth to a son so handsome that people come from miles around to see him – but his sheer beauty causes Gino to doubt that he is truly the boy’s father.

Descending into pathological jealousy and resentment towards a married man who had been Franca’s lover, Gino is unable to stop himself imagining the worst, and embarks on a violent path that has catastrophic effects on those around him.

What I’ve Just Read

Sanctuary by Tom Gaisford (Bath Publishing)

The River Days of Rosie Crow by Rebecca Stonehill (Stairwell Books)

Two women’s lives interweave in the wilds of rural Norfolk, separated by almost two hundred years but bound by their inability to conform to society’s expectations and love of storytelling.

Rosie Crow is spirited, illiterate and deeply connected to the land. She believes the river communicates with her, but rural poverty and superstition set her up as scapegoat for her village’s discontent. What Rosie cannot know is the impact her life will have on a grief-stricken woman many years later… (Review to follow)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

Thunderball by Ian Fleming (The Book Club) #1961Club

James Bond is in disgrace. His monthly medical report is critical of the high living that is ruining his health and M packs him off for a fortnight to a nature-cure clinic to be tuned-up to his former pitch of exceptional fitness. Furiously Bond undergoes the shame of the carrot juice and nut-cutlet regime – and thereby minutely upsets the plans of SPECTRE, a new adversary, more deadly, more ruthless even than Smerch.

Who is SPECTRE? What are its plans? Alas, the organisation is all too realistically described, it’s plans all too contemporary for comfort. Of all James Bond’s adversaries the Chief of SPECTRE casts the darkest shadow.