One of my earliest memories is of being carried on my father’s shoulders along the cliffs towards a white lighthouse at Hunstanton in Norfolk. A little further on, and a little further around the coast, we had a holiday in Happisburgh whose own red and white striped version was perilously close to the rocks below. This building had been designed to warn of imminent danger to those already on the sea. It too was at risk of joining them – imminently.

In The Lamplighters Emma Stonex captures that fine line between the comfort of the light, faithfully kept burning by three lighthouse keepers, and the discomfort of life and death being such close neighbours. I had only really seen lighthouses and their keepers in a somewhat romantic light previously, and this novel is indeed atmospheric as it leads us into a vanishing and vanished way of life.
 
After a period of twenty years the narrator of this book is looking back at events in Cornwall in 1972 when our three keepers seemingly disappeared into thin air. Our appetites are immediately whetted by discovering that the only entrance door had been locked from the inside and all the clocks had stopped. There is some dispute about whether or not there had been bad weather in the area at the time, but the simple fact remains: they are gone.
 
We try to unravel the mystery with the help of the men’s partners who each have their own secrets – some independently as they try to move on, others closely connected with each other. All the time the sea surrounds the lighthouse just as they are each surrounded by doubt and a sense of hopelessness in the face of the unrelenting tides.
 
The book is undoubtedly beautifully written with phrases such as ‘when night yawns for morning and the sea starts to separate from the sky.’ That younger, romantic version of myself was immediately taken back to the coast and these strange monoliths with their unspoken truths. I felt that I was actually there in Cornwall, remembering my first visit to an aunt in Penzance just a year before this fictional event took place.
 
I raced through the first part of the book, intrigued of course by the central plot, but also where each of the key characters had been and where they were going. I really felt that I knew them well and understood the pain of their loss, expressed though this was in quite different ways. As an exploration of loneliness and the effects of isolation, it was outstanding.
 
I did think the second part was too long and could definitely have been shorter in the final third, although the denouement and choice of endings as back stories revealed themselves was gripping and kept me guessing right up until the end. I especially loved the way we discovered who the writer was, and why.
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For any readers seeking a good mystery with a healthy mix of romance and reality, while exploring themes of anxiety and depression, I would heartily recommend this story. I felt a sense of loss when I finished it too.

​Science lessons at school were not generally enjoyable for me. Biology made me pass out whereas Physics made me cry out with frustration. I could understand Chemistry - up to a point. I must admit that even that was still quite a low point in my education and was way down on my preferred periodic table of lessons, with English and History usually combining to make me feel happy instead.

When I read the marketing endorsements for Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus it was really the unusual juxtaposition of science with TV in its own exploratory period that made me sit up and take notice (which I occasionally did in those long-ago classes when not using the Bunsen burners to pointlessly burn hundreds of defenceless spills – a sort of metaphor for my own life back then). Chemical terms are used throughout the book, but I literally jumped over them, happy in the knowledge that our main character – Elizabeth Zott – understands what she is talking about with such authority. The book races along and I had as little inclination as ever to pause for descriptions of method and apparatus.

Elizabeth is a research scientist thwarted by the misogyny of 1950s America and still in the 1960s as she becomes an unwitting feminist hero in her role as the host of a TV cookery show. The programme airs in the afternoon slot immediately before ‘housewives’ everywhere need to galvanise themselves to ensure their husbands’ suppers are on the table the moment they walk through the door. Elizabeth is also strikingly beautiful which leads to both men and women wanting to pigeonhole her even more.

Elizabeth has met and fallen in love with her kindred spirit, Calvin, and a brilliant daughter - brilliantly named Mad for short – is the result of their experiments. Calvin’s back history provides a simmering background to the novel, while Elizabeth, her daughter and curious dog Six Thirty take centre stage.

Achingly funny in places, I loved the introduction of secondary characters such as her down-trodden neighbour and equally eccentric doctor, but her TV producer Walter Pine was probably my favourite of all. He was as mystified by the autistic certainty of Elizabeth as he was captured and concerned in equal measures by her uncontrollable zest for life in largely unforgiving circumstances.

I didn’t really like the ending – and not just because it was the ending. I felt that things unfolded far too quickly. We needed to be put through more tests before arriving at the author’s (and our) results. I got a real feel for early 1960s live television shows but would have liked a little more historical context to this, and in the early part of the story set in the 1950s. I felt that for all the undoubted accuracy (I assume) of the science, some aspects were too thin and skated over before the ice could melt.

In conclusion, this isn’t just a story about a woman trying to make it in a man’s world – then or now – it is a tale of something or somebody quite different from us landing in our everyday lives. It is about how we handle that difference. History shows that we have so often handled that badly. Unsurprisingly I learned more from that subject than the indisputable evidence that science is all around us: it makes us who we are and how we are with others, even if we don’t often talk about it.