This section is overlong, its inconsequential incidents in need of editing, but its force lies in the language. paddles for hands, and webbed feet' wins a round of scholarships when her mother is pregnant with her rival sibling, and promptly exiles herself to a boarding school 400 miles away. This severe creature of 'five foot eleven, with black-rimmed glasses. Moira is clearly a puzzle to her conventional parents. The truly dark pulse of this narrative lies not so much in the foreshadowed tragedy as in the narrator's psyche. Hear the handclap of birds as they dived into the water, and the burr of puffin flight.' The squill and furze would shake on the headland. She writes of 'salt, and wind, and the pop of mussel breath. However, she surmounts an overstretched motif with an oddness and richness of language, a tilting of reality at times reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson's skew-whiff vision in Lighthousekeeping, that delights with its virtuosity. To use a marine theme so dominantly is a risky undertaking, fraught with the enticement of cliché: in following a long line of greats from Shakespeare to Melville to Murdoch, Fletcher also adopts the preoccupation of many lesser writers who thrill to the sea's obvious descriptive opportunities. The sea is a constant presence in the book: an obsession, a metaphor, a source of desire and danger. It is to Amy that this novel is addressed in poignant second-person asides, the use of prolepsis thickening as the story progresses. That's about it, but what carries us along and provides a disturbing undertow is our early knowledge that Moira's younger sister Amy will fall from a rock and lie in a coma. The novel follows Moira Stone from her early days immersed in the landscape of the Pembrokeshire coast to her time at boarding school, her jealousy at the birth of her sister, and her marriage to a man she meets in her teens. A study of loss, regret and the perverse complexities of human love, Oystercatchers is psychologically profound, but at its surface lies a simple tale that eschews the mystery element of its predecessor.

Oystercatchers by Susan Fletcher