Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Bella Bathurst's first book, the acclaimed The Lighthouse Stevensons,told the story of Scottish lighthouse construction by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson. Now she returns to the sea to search out the darker side of those lights, detailing the secret history of shipwrecks and the predatory scavengers who live off the spoils. Even today, Britain's coastline remains a dangerous place. An island soaked by four separate seas, with shifting sand banks to the east, veiled reefs to the west, powerful currents above, and the world's busiest shipping channel below, the country's offshore waters are strewn with shipwrecks. For villagers scratching out an existence along Britain's shores, those wrecks have been more than simply an act of God; in many cases, they have been the difference between living well and just getting by. Though Daphne Du Maurier made Cornwall Britain's most notorious region for wrecking, many other coastal communities regarded the "sea's bounty" as an impromptu way of providing themselves with everything from grapefruits to grand pianos. Some plunderers were held to be so skilled that they could strip a ship from stem to stern before the Coast Guard had even left port, some were rumored to lure ships onto the rocks with false lights, and some simply waited for winter gales to do their work. From all around Britain, Bathurst has uncovered the hidden history of ships and shipwreck victims, from shoreline orgies so Dionysian that few participants survived the morning to humble homes fitted with silver candelabra, from coastlines rigged like stage sets to villages where everyone owns identical tennis shoes. Spanning three hundred years of history, The Wreckers examines the myths, the realities, and the superstitions of shipwrecks and uncovers the darker side of life on Britain's shores.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Here's the dark side of Bathurst's award-winning The Lighthouse Stevensons: tales from the British coastline of scavenging wrecks or deliberating wrecking ships for a living. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Bathurst, who won a Somerset Maugham Award for The Lighthouse Stevensons, offers a spellbinding tale of seafaring men, their ships and the ocean that cares for neither. With the British Isles as her focus, Bathurst covers the four points of the compass, delving into the particulars of each fabulously treacherous area with relish. To the east are the Goodwin Sands, shifting sandbars that rise out of the English Channel at low tide. To the west lies the Corrievreckan, the largest whirlpool in European waters, which nearly swallowed George Orwell in 1947. The Pentland Firth, with its strong, unpredictable currents, terrifies sailors in the north. And to the south, at Cornwall, ships collide with saw-toothed rocks, undersea ridges and each other with alarming regularity. For generations, folks on land have made their living salvaging what they can from the resulting mess. Bathurst probes the gray areas between rescuer, salvager and wrecker; taking advantage of murky regulation and lax enforcement, some coastal dwellers are all three. An air of sweet melancholy hangs over Bathurst's poignant account of ships, men and the circumstances that tear them apart. Illus. not seen by PW; maps. Agent, Kathleen Anderson. (July 14) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Bathurst explains that wreckers were people who watched for a ship in distress and stole everything on board of any value, sometimes also drowning the crew and burning the boats. The Cornish were such accomplished wreckers that they regarded it not as a crime but as a profession. Bathurst traveled to eight wrecking hot spots in Britain in researching the history of wrecking over the last 300 years, its heyday occurring in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when sea traffic was at its heaviest and captains relied on keen-eyed lookouts before the age of sophisticated technology. The sheer variety and range of natural hazards around the coastline make it seem astounding that anyone made safe landfall in Britain at all. During her three years of research, the author interviewed 200 people and read court proceedings, newspaper reports, travelers' journals, and customs correspondence, and the result is an exceptional chronicle of knavery. --George Cohen Copyright 2005 Booklist

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Bella Bathurst is the author of The Lighthouse Stevensons, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and of the novel Special. Her journalism has appeared in the Washington Post, the London Sunday Times, and other major periodicals. Born in London, she lives in Scotland.