Lynch, Beth – The Bell Bookshop

The Cove

Emma — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

‘A book that stays with you and widens your perception of how people and place intertwine’ MATT COLLINS

For over five decades, Beth Lynch has been repeatedly drawn to a rocky spot on the North Cornwall coast, where her earliest memories are rooted in idyllic family holidays. Following the deaths of her parents, strange occurrences around the cove leave Lynch questioning how well she truly knows this place of slate that so irresistibly calls to her. Why has it become so unsettling? Is she safer staying away?

Through encounters with quarrymen, wartime women and an enigmatic archaeologist – along with JMW Turner, Tennyson, Trollope and the Hardys – The Cove reflects lyrically on change: in ourselves, in places and in the transformative dance between the two.

The cove

Emma — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

For over five decades Beth Lynch has been drawn back, over and again, to a rocky spot on the North Cornwall coast. Her earliest memories of the cove are bound up with idyllic family holidays; as she grows older, however, her sense of connection with the place grows deeper and more complicated. This slippery interface of land and sea – a site of sheer edges and ledges, peculiar rock formations and eroding, tumbling slate – becomes her childhood refuge from anxiety and school bullying.

Around the time of her parents’ deaths, strange things start to happen in and around the cove, and Lynch is left wondering how well she really knows this minute section of coast that draws her so ineluctably. Is it the cove, or is it her? What secrets does the cove have to share? Is she safer staying away?

Unfolding through a medium of salt and slate, the elemental indifference of Atlantic Cornwall, The Cove is a lyrical meditation on being a revenant, on haunting and being haunted. Through encounters with quarrymen, wartime women and a enigmatic archaeologist – along with JMW Turner, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas and Emma Hardy – Lynch contemplates what happens when our deepest fears materialise, reflecting on mortality and the nuanced ways in which we take leave of our dead. She explores the profound impacts of change – in ourselves, in places and in the transformative dance between the two.

Where the Hornbeam Grows: A Journey in Search of A Garden

Emma — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

‘Beth Lynch’s subtle and moving book is about the heart-work of finding and making a place for oneself in the world; the effort of putting down roots, the pain of tearing them up again, and how one grows to know another person or another landscape. Horticulture and human feelings twine together here – and what flourishes in the several gardens of this book is, in the end, hope’ ROBERT MACFARLANE

‘I loved Beth Lynch’s tender, wise meditation on grief, home, and the restorative magic of making a garden’ OLIVIA LAING

Out of place and lonely after a relocation to Switzerland, Beth Lynch realises that she needs to get her hands dirty if she is to put down roots. And so she sets about making herself at home in the way she knows best – by tending a garden, growing things. The search for a garden takes her across the country, through meadows and on mountain paths where familiar garden plants run wild, to the rugged hills of the Swiss Jura where she begins to plant her paradise. WHERE THE HORNBEAM GROWS is a memoir about carrying a garden inwardly through loss, dislocation and relocation, about finding a sense of wellbeing in a green place of one’s own, and about the limits of paradise in a peopled world. It is a powerful exploration of how, in nurturing a corner of the natural world, we ourselves are nurtured.