Ten top lighthouses in fiction

Nicholas Royle is the author of seven novels, two novellas and three volumes of short fiction​. He has edited twenty anthologies of short stories. Reader in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize, he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks.

At the Guardian, Royle tagged his top ten lighthouses in fiction. One title on the list:

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

To the Lighthouse with guns. All the action Woolf left out ended up in this first part of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, published in 2014. Four female scientists are transported into an abandoned landscape, Area X, where they face treachery and constant danger. A distant lighthouse represents the possibility of escape. Essentially the record of a really, really bad trip, this is much, much better than the film.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue