Unravelling mystery

THE novel, a surprise best seller in France, where it was first published in 2008, opens with two dramatic events: the arrival of a man, a stranger, in La Hague, a seaside village near Cherbourg, and the start of the first winter storm.

The storm is announced by a howling wind that silences the gulls, and two bolts of lightning. Then the wind smashes the breakwater like a battering ram …

The stranger stays to watch as long as possible, along with another outsider, the nameless woman who is telling the story. She has lived for six months in this bleak spot on the Normandy coast, not far from the island of Alderney. She shares a house right on the harbour, described as ‘an end-of-the-world sort of place, with a handful of men and only a few boats’.