Description

The working lives behind Cornwall’s picture-postcard coast

At the western edge of Cornwall lies the Penwith Peninsula, then the Atlantic. Gavin Knight enters its fishing communities to discover what life looks like behind the holiday photographs and harbour views.

His focus is on the fishermen and the people around them: men and women living with dangerous water, uncertain work and a culture in which old stories sit beside modern pressures. Newlyn’s pubs, moonlit beaches, storms, drink, drugs and sea spray are all part of the same landscape.

Based on immersive research and rich in local voices, The Swordfish and the Star reveals this familiar part of Britain as less picturesque and more precarious. The sea is livelihood, threat and home all at once.

This is a portrait of a community at Britain’s Atlantic edge, revealing the human reality behind romantic ideas of Cornwall and the resilience required to keep working where land finally gives way to water.

‘A gripping novelistic immersion’ Louis Theroux

‘A must-read’ Owen Jones

‘Britain’s Gomorrah’ Independent

Publisher Review

"An alternative perspective, telling the stories of the fishermen who work on this treacherous stretch of coast, tales gathered over two years of interviews, many conducted in the Swordfish and Star of the title" -- Tom Robbins * Financial Times Books of the Year * "A terrific new book about a hard and dangerous way of life" * Esquire, Book of the Year * "Knight has gone in search of old smells and danger and found them in spades. There are extraordinarily evocative stories here, of the mad bravado of scarred, de-fingered fishermen and the stoicism of their women... As a cross-section of west Cornish lives, a celebration of brave eccentricity and a prose illustration of the way those lives overlap and interrelate, The Swordfish and the Star takes some beating" -- Patrick Gale * Guardian * "Knight recounts fascinating detail, but also shows a novelist's skill in painting a vivid picture of real Cornwall and real Cornish people: Shane Meadows meets The Perfect Storm" * Esquire * "[Knight] is as adept with words as his hero Nutty Noah the Cadgwith ring-netter is with a shoal of pilchards ... exhilarating" -- Tom Fort * Literary Review *