‘Light Over Liskeard’ by Louis de Bernieres’

One of the perks of owning a bookshop is that you can get your hands on advance copies of books. Book reps will often bring a small stack of pending titles to our meetings and my staff and I get to read ahead. It makes us better booksellers, better at recommending books to customers. 

‘Light Over Liskeard’ is one of those advance copies which is due in stores this month, but I read it in August and loved it. I’ve been holding off reviewing it until it was available to buy.

So here goes…

Set sometime in the not-too-distant future where cars are self-driving, bots take care of most menial things, children have only virtual friends and national security is increasingly fragile, Q (not his real name) is a quantum cryptographer for the British government. 

Q becomes aware that he knows how to end the world and that if he knows, so too do a number of others scattered across the world. But he isn’t sure that he knows what it means to live and he’s running out of time. He leaves the city, buys a derelict farmhouse on the moors and begins to prepare for what is to come.

The absolute delight of this book is the light touch of the author and his introduction of weird and quirky characters already resident on the moors: a hermit, a knight, a ghost, a widowed South American environmentalist and his lusty daughter, and a range of ‘reintroduced’ species roaming at large. 

I think what I liked most is that it isn’t what you think its going to be – there’s no doom, no wailing and gnashing of teeth, just good story telling and compelling characters that leave you strangely happy to have met them.