With artfully simple prose, Susan Clegg invites you to look beyond the surface. Insightful, understated and finely observed.
– Elise Valmorbida, award-winning author of The Madonna of the Mountains
The Dolphin
by Susan Clegg
Price range: £5.99 through £8.99
Paperback: 978-1-7391777-4-4
Digital: 978-1-7391777-5-1
‘He knew that this was as close to the sea as he could ever get.’
In 1937 Larry Lambert has a vision of a magnificent pub built on frozen fields ‘like a grassy sea’. It is an echo of a single, failed, gay encounter in a fishing boat, and in its construction he invests his energy and his thwarted dreams. He calls it The Dolphin.
And so unfolds a moving exploration of the constraining expectations of society on three generations of one family. For Larry, there is the cruel impossibility of being gay in 1930s Britain and his ensuing loveless marriage with the embittered Rosemary. For his daughter, Joanie, there is the crushing weight of duty and respectability during the post-war years. Only granddaughter Lottie pulls free and finds the freedom her grandfather and mother were denied.
Larry’s decision to build The Dolphin sparks events that play out over decades, tearing one generation apart while bringing another back together.
With artfully simple prose, Susan Clegg invites you to look beyond the surface. Insightful, understated and finely observed.
—Elise Valmorbida, award-winning author of The Madonna of the Mountains
If we’re lucky, our lifetime might last seven or eight decades – year after year of event and incident. But sometimes, out of all that time, one fleeting moment defines a whole life, the repercussions felt for generations.
This is the central theme of The Dolphin, the debut novel from Sheffield-based author Susan Clegg. The book follows three generations of the same family, beginning in the prelude to the Second World War as our tragic hero Larry Lambert struggles with his repressed sexuality and takes a mortifying trip out on a boat called The Dolphin.
The experience itself is over in a morning, but it shapes the rest of Larry’s life, then the life of his daughter Joanie, and her daughter Lottie.
Clegg’s characterisation is gripping, so real it’s uncomfortable. Larry’s buttoned-up wife Rosemary is a masterclass. We’ve all known a Rosemary – someone so caught up in the need to be respectable she has no idea how to be happy, no idea even that being happy might be an option available to her. This is a woman whose life is spent in fear of imaginary judgement, trying to be something that’s always out of reach.
What’s beautiful though is the compassion that runs through the book. Rosemary may be deeply unlikeable as she throws around her poison and inflicts trauma on the next generation, but we see the sadness of her life. Clegg resists the temptation to condemn her.
Despite most of the action of The Dolphin taking place inland, the sea is a constant presence. It’s something that elevates life above the mundane and ordinary, even more powerful as an idea than a reality, and providing an outlet for the longing that pervades the book.
Reading The Dolphin feels like eavesdropping on your neighbours – intimate, real and occasionally excruciating . But ultimately, this is a striking examination of why we make the choices, take the paths, and feel the passions we do – maybe it can all be traced back to one terrifying moment when life’s possibilities were ripped open and we glimpsed what it might be like to be happy.
– Anna Caig, https://murderundergroundbrokethecamel.wordpress.com/2023/07/11/the-dolphin/
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About Susan Clegg
Susan Clegg has short stories published in Matter and The Stinging Fly. She was Highly Commended in the Writers & Artists Killer Fiction competition and was selected to pitch to a panel of agents and publishers at the Bloody Scotland crime writing festival. In 2020, her story, Dogwood, was shortlisted for the V. S. Pritchett Short Story prize, earning this review from Derek Owusu: ‘A story that turns the mundane into magic, sleight of hand sentences that the eyes can’t help but follow.’ The Dolphin is her debut novel and was long listed for the Mslexia prize.