'Poetry in prose. Astutely observed'

Fiona Erskine

Rachel, a trainee vicar struggling to bond with her flock in the coastal town of Holthorpe, learns the terrifying power of the North Sea when her six-year-old daughter goes missing on the beach.

Meanwhile Mary, a defiant and distrustful loner, is fighting her own battle against nature as the crumbling Norfolk shoreline brings her clifftop home ever closer to destruction.

Both scarred by life, the two women are drawn into an unlikely friendship, but Mary's misfit son Adam is nursing a secret. For Rachel, it will subject her battered faith to its greatest test: will she be strong enough to forgive?

In her taut, lyrical debut novel, Hilary Taylor weaves the bleak power of the East Anglian winter into a searingly honest psychological drama, as gripping as any thriller.

Hilary Taylor is a graduate of Edinburgh University and lives in Suffolk, where she taught for almost twenty years. She has five grown-up children and, at the last count, eight grandchildren. Her short fiction has been published in magazines and anthologies and she was the winner of the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction in 2022. Sea Defences , her first novel, began life as a prize-winning short story, placed third in the Bath Short Story Award.