Wrecker: A gripping debut for fans of Poldark and the Essex Serpent. Noel O’Reilly
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NOEL O’REILLY was a student on the New Writing South Advanced writing course. He has worked as a journalist and editor at the international business media company RBI, and is now a freelance writer. This is his first novel. He lives in Brighton with his wife and children.
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Noel O’Reilly 2018
Noel O’Reilly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008274535
‘God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.’
William Cowper, Hymn (1773)
‘Myreugh orth an vorvoren, hanter pysk ha hanter den.
Y vos Dew ha den, yn-lan dhe’n keth uta-na crygyans ren.’
‘Look at the mermaid, half fish and half human. That
He is God and man, to that same fact let us entirely give credence.’
Louis T. Stanley, Journey Through Cornwall (1958)
To Sally
PENWITH, CORNWALL
TEN YEARS AFTER THE FRENCH WARS OR THEREABOUTS
Contents
I got to the beach too late to find anything of real worth. The gale had moved inland, leaving an icy breeze in its wake, and there was a sea stench as if the ocean bed and all its secrets had been torn out overnight and dumped on the strand. All about me the dead from shipwrecks past muttered and moaned in the tongues of their own lands. Having shaken themselves free of their unblessed graves, they shuffled about in search of some lost thing. Look upon them too long, and they’d fade into the mist that sailed across the strand.
A dead wreck it was, all hands drowned. Sounds of hacking and wrenching floated