This wonderful, enthralling debut novel from Amy Sackville takes us through a present day English midsummer day and the freezing cold of the Arctic night 100 years ago in search of a resting place, around which, like the eye of the hurricane, everything revolves – The Still Point.
All her life, Julia has been enthralled by the tales told of their family’s long-lost hero, Edward Mackley, who disappeared on his expedition to reach the North Pole and of his young wife’s romantic, devoted wait for his return. The story follows Julia as she attempts to sort through the relics of his journey, to order and categorise them but she is living in an idealistic dream world, drifting in dreams of arctic cold despite the summer’s heat, blinkered to what is really happening – like Edward sleeping unaware of the cracking shifting ice below him.. When her eyes are finally opened will she achieve the Still Point that she seeks?
Ms Sackville weaves together themes of loss, self-delusion, betrayal and discovery, with alternating threads of heat and cold, idleness and endeavour, creating a wonderful whole. She creates a family of finely drawn, living breathing characters not only the main ones – Julia and Simon, Edward and Emily – but also minor ones – sister Miranda, Aunt Helen, even Tess the cat, and creates a living breathing world for them to move in.
Any Cop?: The back cover quotes a review by Francis Spufford which likens the writing to that of Virginia Woolf – don’t let this put you off, it isn’t a hard intellectual, difficult novel but if you like Ms Woolf’s work you won’t be disappointed – it has the same lyrical quality, same exploration of personality and events triggered by daily happenings.
Mary Mayfield
Bookmunch 
[…] Hey: My favourite books of the year included Amy Sackville’s The Still Point for its intense atmosphere and beautiful writing, Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies for making me […]
[…] The Still Point author is back with a beguiling sounding novel: ‘On a remote island in Orkney, a curiously-matched couple arrive on their honeymoon. He is an eminent literature professor; she was his pale, enigmatic star pupil. Alone beneath the shifting skies of this untethered landscape, the professor realises how little he knows about his new bride and yet, as the days go by and his mind turns obsessively upon the creature who has so beguiled him, she seems to slip ever further from his yearning grasp. Where does she come from? Why did she ask him to bring her north? What is it that constantly draws her to the sea?’ Me thinks there might be a Selkie lurking behind the scenes of this one… […]
[…] Richard, an eminent professor of literature, has married his star pupil who is younger than him by forty years. At her insistence he has taken her north to Orkney for their honeymoon. Here under the tumultuous skies and ever present sea Richard comes to see that he hardly knows his pale wife whose fingers and toes are curiously webbed and who he is unable to capture in a photograph leaving him only able to ‘compile an entire album of phantoms’. As his obsession with her increases she seems to move further and further away from him, spending her days sitting staring at the sea and the horizon ‘a line called the hilder she says, in these parts; a line sometimes luminous, sometimes obscure. Just as she is – luminous, obscure’. All the while she is on the beach Richard watches her from the house supposedly writing his latest book. Orkney is a dark, intense tale of the mysteries of marriage and the never ending lure of the sea from previous winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for The Still Point). […]