#Review: The Lights Around the Shore by Steven Lewis

The Lights Around the Shore
Author: Steven Lewis
Rating: 4/5

The Lights Around the Shore is a novel that moves quietly but insistently, like memory itself. It doesn’t rush toward revelation; instead, it circles—returning again and again to grief, love, time, and the fragile hope that persists even when life feels long exhausted of answers. Steven Lewis gives us Charlie Messina, a seventy-five-year-old photographer, curmudgeonly, sharp-tongued, and deeply wounded, whose inner life is far richer and more turbulent than his abrasive exterior suggests.

The title is not merely poetic window dressing; it is the novel’s emotional compass. “The lights around the shore” evoke something distant yet visible—guides rather than destinations. They suggest the possibility of orientation without certainty, hope without resolution. Throughout the novel, Charlie is not moving toward a grand redemption but toward moments of illumination: fleeting connections, remembered tenderness, and the recognition that time is not linear but layered. As Charlie comes to understand, “every moment we have lived is still alive within each of us”—a quiet but radical reframing of loss itself.

Lewis’s prose is restrained yet lyrical, grounded in the physical details of daily life—coffee cooling in a pot, a dog’s weight shifting beside a chair, a cigarette crushed between fingers. These details do not decorate the narrative; they anchor it. The writing trusts silence and space, allowing emotion to emerge organically rather than being announced. One of the novel’s strengths is its refusal to sentimentalize grief. Charlie’s loss—especially the death of his daughter Joni—is not resolved or softened. Instead, it thickens the “veil” he feels between himself and the world, a membrane that both protects and isolates him. As the novel suggests, “waiting, which I had spent a lifetime perfecting, seems absurd”—a line that quietly dismantles the idea that time heals simply by passing.

Charlie himself is a compelling, if sometimes difficult, protagonist. His abrasiveness can be exhausting, and there are moments when his internal monologues verge on repetition. This is one of the novel’s few weaknesses: certain emotional beats linger a little too long, circling familiar territory when the reader already understands the wound. Yet this, too, feels intentional. Grief is repetitive. So is regret. Charlie’s inability to move cleanly forward mirrors the very human condition the novel examines.

The supporting characters—Sarah, Mason, the boys Charlie encounters—function less as fully autonomous arcs and more as mirrors, reflecting different versions of connection: marital endurance, fractured friendship, generational vulnerability. Particularly effective are Charlie’s interactions with children, which strip away his performative bitterness and reveal a gentler, more attentive self. These scenes feel earned, never cute, and reinforce the book’s central belief that meaning often arrives sideways.

What lingers after the final pages is not plot but atmosphere—a sense that life, for all its bruises, still offers glimmers. The title’s lights never become a blazing beacon; they remain distant, scattered, and human-scaled. And that is precisely the point. Hope here is not loud optimism but quiet persistence: the choice to keep looking, to keep noticing, to keep loving in imperfect ways.

The Lights Around the Shore is not a novel for readers seeking speed or spectacle. It is for those willing to sit with discomfort, to accept that healing is uneven, and to believe—gently—that even in the long night of grief, there are still lights. You may not reach them. But you can see them. And sometimes, that is enough.

Find the book here.