Shanker

It’s only September but I think I have already found my book of the year. It’s just a slim volume written by Benjamin Wood published in 2025.

“Seascraper” is story about a man called Thomas Flett, who lives with his mother in the fictional coastal town of Longferry, England. Thomas is a "seascraper," or "shanker," earning a meagre living by using a horse-drawn cart to trawl for shrimp on the beach, which he then sells to a local distributer for a meagre return. He is only twenty years old, but endures the physically demanding work to support himself and his mother, continuing the craft he learned from his grandfather. Although he respects this hard, repetitive life, Thomas’s secret passion is for making folk music — a dream he hides from the his mother for fear of being ridiculed.

The pivotal moment in the stories takes place when a mysterious American named Edgar arrives in town and enlists Thomas's help finding the perfect filming location for his next movie. Though skeptical at first, Thomas gradually starts to trust Edgar, and the promise of Hollywood glamour shakes him from his daily drudgery, leading him to imagine a different future for himself. But the reader always has a nagging doubt as to whether Edgar’s background and plans for the film are for real, of whether Thomas is being promised an escape that was never realistic.

The whole story unfolds over a single day, distilling relationships between the three principal characters into a rich and intense emotional journey.

The novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize and described as "a book about dreams, an exploration of class and family, a celebration of the power and glory of music... and—stunningly—a love story."

But it’s the environment that that the story centres around, the long tidal beach flats with treacherous sinkholes and frequent fog banks, that becomes perhaps the central character in its own right. The writing is so visually evocative, that it’s not surprising that the film rights were immediately optioned by Brad Pitt’s production company.

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood is published by Penguin Books in Australia