Shore Power

About this book

Harrowmouth, Northumberland, October 2017. Nell Milburn, twenty-eight, used to be a second officer on tankers. Now she runs a two-room seafarers' centre by the dock gate: SIM cards, lifts to the supermarket, a kettle that never stops. She came ashore when her father's stroke took most of his words, and she is no longer sure whether she left the sea or ran from it. Then the Pelagia is detained at Berth Four. Her owner stops answering. Ten men are aboard, owed four months' pay, with a captain too proud to ask for help and a twenty-year-old cadet whose future is stuck at the quay. Winter is coming, the fuel is running low, and the only people who can keep the lights on are a town that hasn't decided whether it cares, and Nell.