https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/16/top-10-lighthouses-in-fiction

These lonely outposts provide stormy literary inspiration to writers from Edgar Allan Poe to Virginia Woolf and PD James

They warn of danger and yet lighthouses in fiction rarely seem to keep characters safe. Work in one and suffer loneliness or worse. Set foot in one in any capacity and immediately feel your options narrowing. There may be only one way in but there will be two ways out, one of which you don’t want to think about. They rise out of the land – and the sea – with the undeniable power of a symbol, a prophecy.

In 1998, a friend working in publishing asked me to read a novel that had recently been published in France, Pharricide by Vincent de Swarte, and write a report on it. I fell immediately and deeply in love with it and wrote in my report that not only should the UK publisher obtain the rights, but they should let me translate it. They didn’t obtain the rights and so I spent the next 20 years trying to find a publisher willing to take it on. Finally, I struck lucky with Confingo Publishing, my translation appearing earlier this year – too late for De Swarte, who sadly died in 2006 aged only 42.