The Toilers of the Sea

Guernsey is certain that Gilliatt is a sorcerer. He lives alone in a house nobody else will take, his boat goes where other boats cannot, and he keeps to himself. What the island does not know is that a girl once wrote his name in the snow with her finger, and that he has arranged his entire life around it. When her uncle's steamer is wrecked on the Douvres, two vertical rocks standing in open sea with the hull jammed between them, the old man swears her hand to whoever can bring back the engine. Gilliatt rows out alone. He stays for months with a hammer, a saw, a few biscuits and no roof, and Hugo gives you every hour of it: the geometry the sea works into stone, the real anatomy of wind, the thing with eight arms that lives in the cave below. Nature is not cruel in this book. It is simply enormous, and it does not know that he is there.