Emma Stonex

Emma Stonex first encountered the Flannan Isles disappearance in the Fortean Times, years before she began writing The Lamplighters in 2018. Three keepers vanished from the Outer Hebrides light in December 1900; a relief crew found its lantern unlit, its gates and doors closed and the beds unmade. The Lamplighters, published in 2021, gives its fictional Maiden Rock tower the stopped clocks, locked inner door and strange weather log, then divides the story between 1972, when a relief boat finds the keepers gone, and 1992, when a writer approaches the wives and girlfriends left behind. Stonex researched the book through keepers' memoirs, technical manuals and interviews, and reached the period by way of its music, television and politics. She had worked as an editor in publishing and had already published novels under a pen name; this was the first to carry her own, and she has called it her heart-and-soul novel. It became a Sunday Times bestseller; translations followed in twenty-five languages.