The lighthouse waits across the bay.

Between the promise and the journey lies the whole fragile life of a family.

Mr and Mrs Ramsay and their eight children have always holidayed at their summer house in Skye, surrounded by family friends. The house is full of conversation, expectation, private irritation and small acts of tenderness. Yet the promised trip to the lighthouse does not take place.

Time passes, bringing war and death, and the summer home stands empty. Years later, the family return, altered by loss, to make the long-postponed visit.

This is Woolf at her most luminous and exacting, transforming domestic life into something vast. The novel’s power lies in the spaces between people: what they say, what they cannot say and what time allows them to understand too late.

VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind.