TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

What if history had gone a different way? What if a lighthouse at the edge of the world was the portal to a parallel world – or worlds – where historical events had very different outcomes? These are key premises explored in The Kingdoms, the new novel by Natasha Pulley that takes her lead character Joe Tournier on mind-warping voyages of discovery as it asks what might have happened if the French, not the English, had won the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

The beginning of The Kingdoms throws the reader into an alternative version of history where England had been defeated by the French in the Napoleonic Wars and is a French colony. Joe Tournier is a British slave, arriving in Londres in 1898 by train. Having lost his memory, he’s taken to an asylum. The only clue to his past is a postcard, waiting at the sorting office for 91 years. It has a picture of a lighthouse on the front – Eilean Mor, in the Outer Hebrides – and on the back, the enigmatic message ‘Come home, if you remember.’

‘The actual setup, alternate [sic] time, history, the French having won the Napoleonic wars, was a way to get Joe to that lighthouse,’ says Natasha from her home in Bristol. ‘I love the sea and light houses. There’s something very strange, uncanny, about arriving at this lighthouse. In real life there was a famous case at Eilean