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    The Lighthouse Witches
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    The Lighthouse Witches
    Unavailable
    The Lighthouse Witches
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Lighthouse Witches

    Written by C.J. Cooke and Joshua Manning

    Narrated by Eva Feiler, Lesley Harcourt and Jess Nesling

    4/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    Don’t miss this chilling gothic thriller from the bestselling author . . .

    ’Cooke has creatively interwoven the darkness of reality with a magical realism that will truly have you gripped’Woman & Home
    ‘Fascinating and enthralling’ Prima
    ‘Wonderfully atmospheric and compelling’ Rosamund Lupton
    ‘A flawless read’ Elizabeth Lee
    ‘Seething with gothic menace’ Caroline Lea
    ‘This ghost story is a perfect mix of propulsive plot and shivers-up-the-spine spookiness’ Good Housekeeping

    Upon the cliffs of a remote Scottish island, Lòn Haven, stands a lighthouse.

    A lighthouse that has weathered more than storms.

    Mysterious and terrible events have happened on this island. It started with a witch hunt. Now, centuries later, islanders are vanishing without explanation.

    Coincidence? Or curse?

    Liv Stay flees to the island with her three daughters, in search of a home. She doesn’t believe in witches, or dark omens, or hauntings. But within months, her daughter Luna will be the only one of them left.

    Twenty years later, Luna is drawn back to the place her family vanished. As the last sister left, it’s up to her to find out the truth . . .

    But what really happened at the lighthouse all those years ago?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 30, 2021
    ISBN9780008354725
    Unavailable
    The Lighthouse Witches
    Author

    C.J. Cooke

    C.J. Cooke is an acclaimed, award-winning poet, novelist and academic with numerous other publications as Carolyn Jess-Cooke. Her work has been published in twenty-three languages to date. Born in Belfast, C.J. has a PhD in Literature from Queen’s University, Belfast, and is currently Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, where she researches creative writing interventions for mental health. C.J. Cooke lives in Glasgow with her husband and four children.

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    Reviews for The Lighthouse Witches

    4/5

    261 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book is extraordinary! You think you know what’s going on…believe me, you have no idea! It’s an utterly brilliant premise. I loved Luna, I think she was an amazing girl. Everyone was written so well, and I even liked Finn despite his obvious lack of musical taste (he doesn’t like Abba. As a diehard Abba fan, l stuck my tongue out at the iPad ?). I just loved this book. SO much.
    • 5/5
      I loved The Lighthouse Witches and the ending…wow I didn’t see the ending coming.
      The writing flows nicely and the story caught my attention at the first chapter and I enjoyed it all along.
      I’m definitely going to read C. J. Cooke’s other books.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book!!!!! Fab from beginning to end! Highly recommended
    • 3/5
      Interesting, held my attention, not sure I liked the resolution but was enjoyable enough story
    • 5/5
      When we think of witches most of us think of black cats, broomsticks, pointy hats and women in black robes. Even these folks are stereotyped to fit what we have been fed from the time we first donned a Halloween costume. The truth is...witchcraft is a religion and a craft that can be practiced by perfectly ordinary looking people of either sex. What Liv found was that when she took the commission to paint the mural in the old lighthouse was that under her feet was the dungeon prison where 100 years past. women had had been imprisoned for fitting the stereotype, be they guilty or innocent. 100 years ago, no one really cared one way or the other. In the timeframe that this story is set nothing much has changed. Mass hysteria again is rampant in the small village, as is the same belief that led to the majority of witch trials in history throughout the world. An unfortunate, natural tragedy that befell a group of people, without any understanding of why it happened. This same type of group is looking for a scapegoat, typically someone who doesn’t conform to society’s expectations at whatever time period. What’s unique about this book is how this group of women in the ‘present day’ storyline is characterized. They appear as though they may be type cast as the witches of their town. They meet secretly by candlelight. They actually whip up the unnecessary hysteria that’s typically used against witches. This story has a mix of fantasy and truth, paranormal and normal, everyday hysteria that can be stirred up by ignorance and misunderstanding. There are witches... both of the actual, magical variety and of the ordinary women prosecuted by insecure men on power trips variety. There is magic. There is folklore and mysterious creatures known as Wildlings. There are shady, untrustworthy characters with unclear motives. the lighthouse setting was creepy and gave the story the proper atmosphere. The history of the land that the lighthouse stands on is spooky enough to give the reader plenty of goosebumps and chills and it grows in importance as the story continues, but not in the ways in which you originally might believe. I think my favorite part of this book was the author’s ability to just keep me guessing, and the general atmosphere of unease she so cunningly delivers. Sometimes it's hard to remember that hundreds of years divide this storyline. Strange appearances, elements of folklore, superstition, and love that extends through generations come together to create a both classic and modern tale of witchcraft.
    • 5/5
      Wow. What a book. What…A….Book! A combination of a remote Scottish island, a lighthouse and witches. I don't think it could get any better. In 1998, Liv and her three daughters, Sapphire, Luna and Clover, travel to the island of Lòn Haven, off the coast of the Black Isle in Scotland. Liv is to paint a mural on the walls of The Longing, the island's lighthouse. In 2021, Luna returns to Lòn Haven, the place where her mother and two sisters vanished without trace twenty-three years earlier. Interspersed with these two narratives is the story of the witch hunts that took place on the island in the 1600s.This book has an ethereal feel coupled with the realities of life as a single mother for Liv, giving it an all-important (to me) foot in reality. It also feels sinister and eerie and to my surprise, as not many books achieve this, I was rather unnerved by it, a feeling of unease creeping over me as the tension builds in all three of the timelines.This book couldn't be rushed. I wanted to soak up every little detail. It's full of atmosphere in a closed and judgemental setting and Liv and her family are outsiders trying to fit in amongst the island's myths and folklore that spans centuries. I sensed her unease, especially when things that were starting to make sense to her were also completely unpalatable and unthinkable.The Lighthouse Witches is gothic, unsettling and witchy, with multiple perspectives and timelines, and a family mystery at the heart of it. When the ending came it was clever and well thought out and it worked brilliantly. It had exactly what I love in a book: a story that gripped me hard from the outset and only let go when I turned the final page, a setting that had me in its thrall, and superb writing and plotting. I thought I would enjoy it but it completely exceeded all my expectations and I absolutely adored it.
    • 5/5
      In 1998, with nowhere else to go and running from a secret, Olivia Stay and her three daughters arrived on a remote Scottish island where she had been commissioned to paint a mural. She is given very little instruction, just a diagram of what she is meant to paint inside the crumbling lighthouse.

       The island is rife with a dark history of murder and mayhem but Olivia is out of options and at least able to have a roof over her children's heads which is something they have lacked since her husband's death. At some point, we know not why, the eldest and youngest daughter disappear, and the middle child is abandoned in the woods before Olivia also goes missing. Now all these years later that middle child is a grown and pregnant woman who has never given up hope of finding out what happened to her family, when out of the blue she is told her baby sister has been found. Her joy at this news soon turns to shock and dread when she rushes to be reunited with her sister, and finds not the grown woman she expected, but a 7 year old child who thinks she has only been gone for days instead of decades.

       Legend, myth, and folklore bubble over into the modern day in this chilling story of witches and changelings. Multi layered complex characters weave together a terrifying narrative told on three timelines. The ever increasing suspense kept me glued to the pages. Highly recommended to all fans of horror and folklore.


      I received an advance copy for review.
    • 4/5
      The Lighthouse Witches is a blend of several genres: Gothic, paranormal, and mystery. At the outset, author C. J. Cooke expertly sets the eerie, evocative scene: a decommissioned lighthouse called the Longing on the Scottish island of Lon Haven. It is "a white bolt locking earth, sky, and ocean together. . . . [L]ovely in its decrepitude, feathery paint gnawed off by north winds and rust-blazed window frames signatures of use and purpose." It stands one hundred and forty-nine feet tall and offers breathtaking views from the lantern room accessed by climbing one hundred and thirty-eight steps. In a first-person narrative, Liv describes arriving on Lon Haven in 1998 and seeing it for the first time with a sense of haunting familiarity, even though she has never been there before. She has come to the island with her children in tow looking for a fresh start, on the run from an unpleasant truth she is too frightened to face head-on. She is well aware of "how stupid" her thought process is, but is unable to disavow herself of the ludicrous notion that if she just ignores the problem it will go away. They are to live in the rustic lighthouse keeper's cottage while Liv paints a mural inside the lighthouse that has been commissioned by the owner, Patrick Roberts. He wants the mural to be "stunning and inspiring" and plans to turn the lighthouse into a writing studio.Sapphire immediately finds a grimoire -- an old book of spells -- on the cottage's bookshelf. Cooke inserts excerpts of "The Grimoire of Patrick Roberts," which details the life of a local family who "lived our lives by magic" in 1662 and what ultimately happened to them. Liv and her children learn there were witch hunts not just in the United States, but also in Scotland and England. In fact, women believed to be witches were imprisoned in a dungeon underneath the lighthouse before being burned if they were found guilty of witchcraft. One of those witches cursed the island as she was dying, and a young child went missing there thirty years earlier. According to the boy's sister, another child was found a year later who looked just like him, but bearing a telltale mark on his neck. Was he a wildling, sent to kill every member of his family until their bloodline was destroyed? Sapphire's first-person narrative expresses her dismay at being dragged from her school, friends, and boyfriend in New York to live in the "arse-end of nowhere." She misses her stepfather, Sean, who died in a car accident, and daydreams about her biological father materializing. Liv and Sapphire have an unsurprisingly fraught relationship -- at fifteen, the always headstrong girl has grown disrespectful and defiant. But Liv loves all her girls boundlessly and struggles to balance raising them as a single mother with accepting commissions for paintings and teaching art. Yet another narrative is set in 2021 and focuses on Luna, who has only fragmented memories of the time she spent on Lon Haven. Her psychiatrist has explained that whatever happened to her all those years ago was so horrific that she dissociated, "effectively checking out of the horror," her memories deeply buried in her mind. Liv abandoned her when she was just nine years old. "No explanation. No apparent motivation. Just dumped her in the woods and vanished into thin air." Now she and her boyfriend, Ethan, are expecting their first child. She has vowed never to return to Lon Haven, but maintains Facebook pages devoted to her missing sisters, Sapphire and Clover, neither of whom have ever been accounted for since they went missing more than two decades ago.But then Luna receives a life-changing call. Clover has been found! Since she was seven when she disappeared, she is twenty-nine years old now. But when Luna rushes to the hospital to meet the "wee girl" who has been found, she is disappointed. It's not Clover at all. It's a seven-year-old girl. But the girl bears an uncanny resemblance to Clover and asks why Sapphire is carrying the stuffed giraffe Clover adored. Sapphire kept it in the intervening years. The girl has knowledge of other matters, as well, that only Clover could possess.Cooke weaves a tale of increasing angst in 1998. The creepy lighthouse has been vandalized with horrific symbols, but as Liv prepares to bring the mural to life, she makes other unsettling discoveries. She meets Patrick Roberts, the "island's mystery millionaire," who turns out to be much younger and more eccentric than anticipated. And disturbing details come to light about how he came to own the lighthouse.Meanwhile, in 2021, Luna struggles with the prospect of marrying Ethan and takes custody of Clover, who insists that she just left the cottage on Lon Haven the night before she was found. She was discovered wandering on the side of the road, claiming that she'd gone looking for Luna. And she has an inexplicable mark on her hip.Cooke deftly alternates the narratives into a cohesive tale of witchcraft, curses, time travel, and legends that mystify and frighten her characters and mesmerize readers. Liv is an empathetic character -- a single mother doing her best to care for her children and earn a living after experiencing trauma. She is frightened and in denial about what the future might hold for her and her daughters. Sapphire is a typically inquisitive, willful teenager trying to assert her independence, while Luna is a young woman who survived early traumatization but has found a man who loves her and is attempting to lead as normal a life as possible when it is upended by the reappearance of Clover. But it can't really be Clover. So Luna has to return to Lon Haven to face her own demons and determine who Clover really is.As the narratives meld cohesively, Cooke gradually reveals the details of her uniquely inventive plot as she gradually accelerates the story's pace and ramps up the dramatic tension. She assembles a world in which wildlings (also known as fae or fairies), witches, and magic exist, and reveals the true motives of Patrick Roberts. She also explains precisely what happened to Liv and Sapphire, as well as Clover's true identity, and provides a conclusion that is surprisingly emotional yet fitting and, ultimately, uplifting and hopeful. In the process, she relates a tale that is engrossing and entertaining. With her richly descriptive prose and thoughtful examination of parent-child relationships, lost love, and the power of fear, she might make believers even of readers for whom the genre is outside their comfort zone.Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader's Copy of the book.