Diving Belles

Each story in Wood’s debut collection is set on the misty, craggy coast of Cornwall, England, where the author grew up. Aching and mystical, these tales speak of husbands turned to mermen who haunt nearby shipwrecks, as in the title story; plundering ghosts of thieving sailors in “Lights in Other People’s Houses”; fairies who emerge with the application of magical eye cream in “Of Mothers and Little People”; and a moor where “There were hundreds of bones, heaped and leaning like the beams and joints of an abandoned mansion,” in “The Giant’s Boneyard.” Wood never pokes fun at her subjects, no matter how outlandish, treating their lives, loves, and tragedies with respect in landscapes ripe with magical realism. The isolated characters are mired in loneliness, and while transformation is a recurrent theme, few stories offer resolution. Instead, Wood brings into focus what hovers at the edge of reality, pulling those phantoms front and center. Rich with folklore, steeped in the sounds and scents of the ever-present sea, these stories flicker and disappear before reason kicks in, much like the creatures of legend that inhabit them. These are distinctively grown-up fairy tales that recreate a sense of wonder and imagination without the moral endings of their childhood counterparts, but, like them, linger in the imagination. Agent: Elizabeth Sheinkman, Curtis Brown. (Aug.)