Winner of the 2013 Mc Kitterick Prize Shortlisted for the 2013 East Midlands Book Award Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 Shortlisted for New Writer of the Year in the 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards The Lighthouse" begins on a North Sea ferry on whose blustery outer deck stands Futh a middle-aged recently separated man heading to Germany for a restorative walking holiday. Spending his first night in Hellhaus at a small family-run hotel he finds the landlady hospitable but is troubled by an encounter with an inexplicably hostile barman. In the morning Futh puts the episode behind him & sets out on his week-long circular walk along the Rhine. As he travels he contemplates his childhood; a complicated friendship with the son of a lonely neighbour; his parents' broken marriage & his own. But the story he keeps coming back to the person & the event affecting all others is his mother & her abandonment of him as a boy which left him with a void to fill a substitute to find. He recalls his first trip to Germany with his newly single father. He is mindful of something he neglected to do there an omission which threatens to have devastating repercussions for him this time around. At the end of the week Futh sunburnt & blistered comes to the end of his circular walk returning to what he sees as the sanctuary of the Hellhaus hotel unaware of the events which have been unfolding there in his absence."