NATASHA PULLEY

Meet the author fascinated by a century-old mystery

- Jonathan Wright

IT WAS ON BOXING DAY IN 1900 THAT THE lighthouse tender Hesperus reached Eilean Mòr in the Outer Hebrides, a remote island that should have been home to a trio of lighthouse men. Relief keeper Joseph Moore was put ashore. What he discovered has spooked people ever since. The island was deserted, and to this day it’s unclear what happened to the men.

Among those fascinated by the story is novelist Natasha Pulley. “What really caught my interest about it was not necessarily what happens from the point of view of those lighthouse keepers,” she says, “but what was it like for the first person to reach the lighthouse after them?”

It was a question that got her working on her fourth novel The Kingdoms, a book that mixes timeslip plotting with alternate history as it follows the story of Joe Tournier, resident of Londres. He’s a man suffering from amnesia, who’s moving through a world where Britain lost the Napoleonic Wars after being defeated at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805: “One of the things I’m really interested in are those moments in history where you can see, very clearly, two possible futures hanging in the balance.”

An answer to Tournier’s nagging doubts about who he is may lie north, which sets him off on “a very gradual wild goose chase up the coast of Scotland”. To say too much more is to risk spoilers, but the story of Eilean Mòr so intrigues Pulley that she’s heading for Scotland’s islands herself this summer, aboard a square rigger, Pelican of London, “in the unlikely capacity of a marine scientist”.