The Headland

A novel about the dark gifts of grief, what it means to belong, and the possibility that time and space may not be what we think they are.

It is the morning following a devastating hurricane on England's south coast, and local painter Dolores is walking the shingle beach of the Headland. She spots something unusual lurking in a piece of driftwood—a color, a creature, perhaps something fostered by the twin forces of storm and atomic fallout. It's all anyone has been talking about, after all, just months after Chernobyl and in the shadow of the local nuclear power station.

Decades later, her son Morgan returns to the Headland to arrange for Dolores' funeral. The power station is about to be decommissioned, and the bleak landscape is best known now as a landing point for desperate immigrants from across the Channel. Morgan's girlfriend is pregnant—an unexpected revelation that he is not at all sure about—and he is especially keen to discover what he can from his mother's unusual cottage, especially about his father, whom he has never known. He uncovers the diary his mother wrote following the hurricane. It tells a story about Dolores and the strange being she discovers on the beach—a story which is both enthralling and heartrending. As he reads the journal, Morgan's own experiences of the Headland become increasingly inexplicable. The journal challenges Morgan's ideas about love and grief, parenthood and belonging, and the very fabric of time. As he unravels the mysteries of his mother's past, he must come to terms with his own origins and face the growing violence from those who would threaten the peace of the Headland.

The Headland hooked me from the very start with its powerful, sensory descriptions of the south coast and the great storm of 1987. Out of that wild night emerges the mysterious presence at the heart of this novel: an entity that glimmers, in Curtis's poetic hands, with alien beauty and with the stunning force of grief. This is a strange, dark, gorgeous song of a novel.

A creaturely, stylish, kind-hearted book.

Abi Curtis

Abi Curtis is Professor of Creative Writing at York St John University, UK. She is the author of two poetry collections, Unexpected Weather and The Glass Delusion, and has been awarded both an Eric Gregory Award and Somerset Maugham Award. Her debut novel was Water & Glass, a speculative climate change story (2017). She was highly commended in both the Bridport, Alpine Fellowship and Fish Prizes in 2022 for three of her short stories. Abi has written critical pieces on the subjects of representations of maternity in speculative fiction, teaching creative writing, the uncanny and mushrooms in literature, and the giant squid. She has also been involved in multi-media creative projects on bees.