THE EXILE OF SARA STEVENSON

A feisty aristocrat seeks out her destiny at the end of the world.

In her debut novel, Hannah indulges a fascination with lighthouses and historical fiction to craft an imaginative fantasy that veers precariously between tasteful romance and bodice-ripper. “Someone once told me that every tower had a ghost, and every ghost had a story,” begins narrator Sara Stevenson, the fictionalized daughter of the famous Scottish lighthouse engineer Robert Stevenson. Newly pregnant, the scandalized girl has been exiled to Cape Wrath, the most northwesterly point in Great Britain, in the year 1814. Furious with her family, she mourns the loss of her suitor, Thomas Crichton, a sailor who mysteriously vanished on the day of their planned elopement. Her reluctant protector in this uneasy locale is the secretive light-keep William Campbell, a gentle but brusque man who Sara seems to be forever accusing of ill intentions, even as he keeps a secret of his own. The collision of these two characters is highly entertaining, but Hannah muddies the fish-out-of-water story with an incongruous mystery. Sara is intrigued when she receives in the post an unusual timepiece, delivered by an Oxford scholar who promised to return it to another woman, Sara Crichton, at the wish of her dying husband. This wrinkle makes all the time-traveling in Diana Gabaldon’s series seem absolutely straightforward by comparison, although Hannah manages to keep the mystery afloat right up until the story’s end. Along the way, though, the author often makes too obvious an attempt to formalize her language while indulging in lots of hand-wringing about love torn asunder. Yet readers may find themselves won over by Stevenson’s fundamental conflict. “Two different men from totally different worlds there could not be,” she says, “and, God help me, but my heart was overwhelmed with a want of both of them.”

A pleasant enough diversion that takes itself more seriously than it probably should.