Weatherglass

Alec Rand kept the light at Snettisham Point from 1958 until it was automated in 1998. He also kept a log, and in the margins of that log he wrote, in a hand that gets smaller each decade, a private weather report on his own marriage.

Ivo Brandt found the logs in a house clearance in 2019 and has built a novel out of them — not a transcription but an act of reconstruction, filling in the forty years that Rand recorded in three-word entries. It is a book about how much can be carried by a very small vocabulary.

Douglas Ferrier has narrated eleven titles for us and this is the one we would put first. His Rand is dry, evasive and quietly devastating, and he resists every opportunity the text offers to be sentimental.