Seascraper

by Benjamin Wood

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Thomas longs to become a folk singer — a dream that has always seemed far beyond his reach. Yearning to bring his dreams to life, the young shrimp catcher gets an unexpected chance to explore his passions in this movingly immersive tale.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE

“Seascraper shimmers, salt-flecked and rippling. It swells with tense, memorable moments...Poignant, authentic, and hopeful.” —The Spectator

“In two words: Short. Brilliant.” —The Times (London)

Twenty-year-old Thomas Flett lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, Northern England, working his grandpa’s trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the drizzly shore to scrape for shrimp, and spends the afternoon selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and sea-scum, pining for his neighbor, Joan Wyeth, and playing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but this remains a private dream.

Then a mysterious American arrives in town and enlists Thomas’s help in finding a perfect location for his next movie. Though skeptical at first, Thomas learns to trust the stranger, Edgar, and, shaken from the drudgery of his days by the promise of Hollywood glamour, begins to see a different future for himself. But how much of what Edgar claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas?

Haunting, timeless, and stunningly atmospheric, Seascraper tells the story of a quiet existence upturned over the span of one day, and a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows.

“A small wonder...Wood delivers so much in few words...reads like the forging of a new myth.” —Financial Times

“Benjamin Wood is a magnificent writer and I intend to read everything he has written.” —Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize–winning author of Shuggie Bain

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668231715
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	11/04/2025
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Benjamin Wood was born in 1981 and grew up in Merseyside. Seascraper is his fifth novel. His previous works have been shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Book Prize, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the RSL Encore Award, the CWA Gold Dagger Award and the European Union Prize for Literature. In 2014, he won France’s Prix du Roman Fnac. He is a senior lecturer in creative writing at King’s College, London, and lives in Surrey with his wife and sons.

Read an Excerpt

First Low Water 

Thomas Flett relies upon the ebb tide for a living, but he knows the end is near. One day soon, there’ll hardly be a morsel left for him to scrounge up from the beach that can’t be got by quicker means at half the price. Demand for what he catches is already on the wane, and who’s to say the sea will keep on yielding shrimp worth eating anyway. There’s all sorts in the water now that wasn’t there when he was just a lad. Strange chemicals and pesticides and sewage. Barely a few weeks ago, there was a putrid fatty sheen upon the sand from east to west; a month before, he waded in a residue of foam that reeked of curdled milk as he approached the shallows. Fleeting things, but if you’re asking him, they augur trouble – it’s been hard to sleep of late. His dreams are full of slag heaps made from rotten shrimp, and he’s there in amongst them with a shovel, trying to clear a path. 

It’s five o’clock or thereabouts. He rises with the sky half-dark between the junction of his curtains, weary with the aches of yesterday. The sea-clothes he peeled off when he came home are slung over the chair beside the open window for an airing: his wool jumper, oiled and mangy at the chest from the persistent wiping of his hands; his trousers patched up at the knees; a shirt gone vinegary beneath the armpits. But no matter. Who’ll be sniffing him except his mother and the horse?