Rubjerg Knude Fyr

One flash. Darkness. Two flashes. Darkness. Every thirty seconds.

In 1891, the coast around Rubjerg Knude in North Jutland is still dark. Ships run aground, and sailors drown. In Copenhagen, the director of lighthouses fights to secure funding for a new one. On 27 December 1900, the light on the dune shines for the first time. For sixty-seven years it sweeps across the North Sea. Beside the tower live the keepers and their families. Night after night they climb the ninety-nine steps. In the morning they shovel the sand away from their doors. More than once a ship runs aground right outside their windows. During the two world wars, mines wash ashore, and one of the station's sons pays for his courage with his life.

In 1968 the light goes out. But life on the dune goes on. The empty lighthouse becomes a museum dedicated to the sand, and every morning its entrances have to be shovelled clear. A blacksmith becomes the dune warden. With his mare Stine, he buries pine tops in the dune to keep the wind from carrying the sand away. The café by the tower is filled with the scent of freshly baked kringle, and Stine gets the end pieces. Then the dune swallows the houses, and the church on the cliff is taken down stone by stone. The edge of the cliff creeps ever closer to the tower, until a bricklayer from Lønstrup has an idea, and in 2019 the whole tower is moved seventy metres inland.

The keepers and their families, the ships that ran aground off the tower and the people who came after them were all real. Thorsten Kuhlmann found them in parish registers, police reports and old newspapers, and corresponded with people who had lived and worked there. The result is a novel that tells the whole story of this place, from 1891 to the present day. At its heart lies Lønstrup, the small village on the coast, with its lifeboatmen, fishermen and neighbours. Once you have read the book, walking through Lønstrup, across the dune and up into the tower feels different. And you know who lived here.