Diving Belles

By Lucy Wood

Along Cornwall's ancient coast, the flotsam and jetsam of the past becomes caught in the cross-currents of the present and, from time to time, a certain kind of magic can float to the surface...

Straying husbands lured into the sea can be fetched back, for a fee. Magpies whisper to lonely drivers late at night. Trees can make wishes come true - provided you know how to wish properly first. Houses creak, fill with water and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A teenager's growing pains are sometimes even bigger than him. And, on a windy beach, a small boy and his grandmother keep despair at bay with an old white door.

In these stories, Cornish folklore slips into everyday life. Hopes, regrets and memories are entangled with catfish, wrecker's lamps, standing stones and baying hounds, and relationships wax and wane in the glow of a moonlit sea.

This luminous, startling and utterly spellbinding debut collection introduces in Lucy Wood a spectacular new voice in contemporary British fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781408816868

Lucy Wood

Lucy Wood is the critically acclaimed author of Diving Belles, a collection of short stories based on Cornish folklore, and Weathering, a debut novel about mothers, daughters and ghosts. She has been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, and was runner-up in the BBC National Short Story Award. She has also received a Betty Trask Award, a Somerset Maugham Award and the Holyer an Gof Award. She lives in Cornwall.

Reviews for Diving Belles

[schufman · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Surreal and creepy, I couldn't get my feet under me as these stories sucked me in and left me hanging. Everything in this world is just a little off kilter, a little unfamiliar, a little unrealistic. Everything feels unconfirmed--this could be a book about belief as much as it could be fantasy as much as it could be mental illness/neurodivergence. Nothing was resolved, and I loved the feeling of being carried along with no beginning and no end. I don't know that I've ever run into a book I would describe as terrifyingly soft before, but here it is.

[lakesidemusing · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Magical, mythical, a little quirky, sometimes creepy, and just plain fun!

Diving Belles, an engaging new short story collection by Lucy Wood, grabbed me from the opening passage:
"Iris crossed her brittle ankles and folded her hands in her lap as the diving bell creaked and juddered towards the sea. At first, she could hear Demelza shouting and cursing as she cranked the winch, but the as bell was cantilevered away from the deck her voice was lost in the wind. Cold air rushed through the open bottom of the bell, bringing with it the rusty smell of The Matriarch's liver-spotted flanks and the brackish damp of seaweed. The bench Iris was sitting on was narrow and every time the diving bell rocked she pressed against the footrest to steady herself. She kept imagining that she was inside a church bell and that she was the clapper about to ring out loudly into the water, announcing something. She fixed her eyes on the small window and didn't look down. There was no floor beneath her feet, just a wide open gap and the sea peaked and spat. She lurched downwards slowly, metres away from the side of the trawler, where a layer of barnacles and mussels clung on like the survivors of a shipwreck."

The collection features women turning to stone, husbands disappearing with mermaids, a house with an attitude, leprechauns, and more. It's no wonder Wood has been compared to Angela Carter. My natural tendency is to breeze through a collection like this in a single day, and a peaceful hotel balcony in Lake Placid proved to be an ideal reading spot. However, I'd recommend that you dole the stories out over several days, or even a week, instead. You'll enjoy returning to Lucy Wood's wonderfully weird world again and again.

[janerawoof · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

More a collection of vignettes than short stories, an enthralling blend of realism and surrealism, moving easily and seamlessly from one to the other. The author has evoked Cornwall and her folklore, blending contemporary stories with just the right note of otherworldliness. A woman is turning to stone while house hunting with a boyfriend. A phantom wrecker--one who lured ships onto rocks and stole their cargoes--appears and occupies the house of a couple who has recently moved in. A mother has a phantom lover. Shapeshifting in a nursing home. House spirits watch over its charge, first empty then through the years of a family living there, then the house gradually empties again. Ghostly dogs on a nighttime moor, explored by father and daughter.Unsettling but somehow hypnotic in its lyrical writing.Highly recommended.

[bodachliath · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a very promising debut collection of short stories, many of which seamlessly blend modern life with elements of Cornish folk-tales - full of imagination and very intriguing.

[kaylaraeintheway · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a lovely collection of short stories! Wood takes old myths and legends from Cornwall and places them in more modern settings. The way she describes the landscape of Cornwall - the sea, the moors, the fields, the towns - transports the reader right to these places. And the stories themselves are fantastic; in the title story, wandering husbands get lured into the sea by mermaids, and the abandoned wives can pay a fee to go down in diving bells to get them back. In another story, two children play in a graveyard of ancient giant's bones. In another, a woman who can feel herself begin to turn into stone goes with her ex-boyfriend to look at a house in a snowstorm. In perhaps my favorite story in this collection, house spirits keep track of the comings and goings of its inhabitants throughout the years, making sure the lights are turned off and the carpets look nice. A lot of these stories are presented without any real explanation or conclusion, and that makes them all the more powerful. It's as if these events actually happened in this mysterious land of Cornwall, and Wood is writing them down as history.

[shanaqui_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

These stories are lovely little things, and very beautifully written. But they're so unsatisfying because they don't seem to end, they just stop. This was actually interesting for the first few, but when you can predict the vague way all the stories will end, the magical effect wears off somewhat.

[dark_phoenix54 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“Diving Belles” is the first book by Wood, but it doesn’t seem like it. She writes with a maturity that is rare in a new author. These short stories are set in her native Cornwall, and the sea plays a part in some of the tales. A long dead ship wrecker takes up residence in a young couple’s house, bringing salt and sand and shells in with him. A woman deals with her guilt over her husband’s and son’s deaths by giving up most everything and living in a cave on the shore. Husbands leave home to become mermen. Not all the stories are of the sea, though, but they all deal with the paranormal world- but with the most everyday manner. We see the inhabitants of a house through the eyes of the house itself. An assisted living home specializes in magical beings. An unimaginably old droll teller (a Cornish wandering story teller) finds himself forgetting the historical things that have happened in the town even though he personally saw them. I’ve seen some reviewers likening Wood to Angela Carter, but I disagree. Carter’s work frequently had a bloody mindedness to it that Wood’s lacks. I’d say she was most like Alice Hoffman, but, really, she is not a copy of anyone. Highly recommended for anyone who likes some surrealism and magical realism with their literary fiction.

[leahmo-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lucy Wood’s debut short story collection is haunting, dreamy, and so, so beautiful. I’m not familiar with Cornish folklore, but my understanding is that each of these stories involves some aspect of this folklore, from wisht hounds to droll tellers, husband-stealing mermaids to buccas. Now, let me stop you before you decide, “I don’t know what any of those things are, so I don’t care to read this.” It doesn’t matter. You will be so fascinated and curious that you will spend hours reading up on Cornish folklore, and you will love it.The stories in this collection feature a woman who goes under the sea in a diving bell to retrieve her husband, who was taken by the mermaids many years before; a woman who feels herself turning to slowly to stone and knows she will soon stand atop a cliff over the sea with the other stone people; a nursing home for witches; a story told from the perspective of the spirits inhabiting a house; a wishing tree; a boy searching for his father in a giant’s boneyard; and a wrecker telling stories of an underwater town.I’m pretty sure Lucy Wood is actually a will-o’-the-wisp herself, because she has this crazy mythological ability to draw you relentlessly, helplessly off the beaten path and into the wild moors of her imagination. I really loved the way she weaves together folklore and reality in an absorbing, dreamy, whimsical way. She is a wonderful talent, and her words made me feel the mournful damp of the moors, hear the pulsing surf, and taste the salt in the sea air. Her stories have a strong voice and a cohesive tone throughout the collection.Diving Belles is a gorgeous, surreal collection of stories merging modern life and Cornish folklore. Although short story collections are perfect for savoring, I couldn’t put this book down, and I read it over a span of 30 hours. I needed full immersion in these murky, maritime stories! Do yourself a favor and dive into these beauties headfirst. But take a deep breath first, because you’ll never want to surface.Read the full review at Books Speak Volumes.

[lauriebrown54 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“Diving Belles” is the first book by Wood, but it doesn’t seem like it. She writes with a maturity that is rare in a new author. These short stories are set in her native Cornwall, and the sea plays a part in some of the tales. A long dead ship wrecker takes up residence in a young couple’s house, bringing salt and sand and shells in with him. A woman deals with her guilt over her husband’s and son’s deaths by giving up most everything and living in a cave on the shore. Husbands leave home to become mermen. Not all the stories are of the sea, though, but they all deal with the paranormal world- but with the most everyday manner. We see the inhabitants of a house through the eyes of the house itself. An assisted living home specializes in magical beings. An unimaginably old droll teller (a Cornish wandering story teller) finds himself forgetting the historical things that have happened in the town even though he personally saw them. I’ve seen some reviewers likening Wood to Angela Carter, but I disagree. Carter’s work frequently had a bloody mindedness to it that Wood’s lacks. I’d say she was most like Alice Hoffman, but, really, she is not a copy of anyone. Highly recommended for anyone who likes some surrealism and magical realism with their literary fiction.

[kmaziarz_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Whimsical, magical, and full of wonder, Wood’s stories beguile the reader into a version of England’s foggy Cornwall coast in which the unexpected not only can happen but usually does. Characters in these stories live side by side with creatures out of mythology, sometimes becoming those creatures themselves. In the title story, staying husbands have become mermen and their wives must brave the depths to bring them home. In Countless Stones, a young woman helps a former lover as he house-hunts while slowing and inexorably turning to stone. In another stand-out story, Of Mothers and Little People, a daughter discovers that her mother is a fully-formed human being in her own right, with secret joys that daughters seldom imagine in their parents—in this case, a faery lover.These are truly grown-up fairy tales, with touches of magical realism and outright enchantment never obscuring the very real stories and characters underneath. There are few easy answers or pat morals in these fairy stories.