The Penwith Peninsula in Cornwall is where the land ends. In The Swordfish and the Star Gavin Knight takes us into this huddle of grey roofs at the edge of the sea at the beginning of the 21st century. It is revealed as a microcosm of Britain, a Middlemarch, with the drama and increasing precariousness of life there resonating far beyond its shores.

Gavin Knight has caught the stories of dreamers and fighters, of the lost and the saved, the timeless and the new -- and...