The Tide Clock

About this book

Kilbaun has a harbour, a bar of shifting sand at its mouth that has drowned more men than the open sea, and a clock that the whole coast once envied: two faced, hour and tide, built in the 1960s by its own clockmaker, Brendan Fall, a genius the town produced and, the phrase they use is, did not deserve. The tide face was no ornament. Fall had built into the movement a thing years ahead of its time, a mechanical computation of the bar's dangerous waters, and the clock rang a warning bell when the bar turned killer, and for eleven years the fleet trusted it the way they trusted daylight. Then came the night of the Marian, 1979. Three men lost on the bar, the worst night in the town's memory.