From the Bookshelf of Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge…

The mud-grey sea heaved sluggishly under a sky the colour of thin milk, faintly luminous at the horizon as if the fickle sun were about once more to break through. Above this pale transparency there hung great bunches of darker-grey and black cloud, like a half-raised curtain. Thirty feet below him he could see the stippled underbelly of the waves as they rose and spent themselves with weary inevitability, as if weighted with sand and pebbles. The rail of the promenade, once so pristine and white, was rusted and in parts broken, and the grassy slope between the promenade and the beach huts looked as if it hadn’t been cropped for years. Once he would have seen below him the long shining row of wooden chalets with their endearingly ridiculous names, ranged like brightly painted dolls’ houses facing the sea. Now there were gaps like missing teeth in a decaying jaw and those remaining were ramshackle, their paint peeling, precariously roped by staves driven into the bank, waiting for the next storm to sweep them away. At his feet the dry grasses, waist-high, beaded with dry seed pods, stirred fitfully in the breeze which was never entirely absent from this easterly coast.

Daylight, tentative and bleak, stole like a chill breath into the wood, wrapping itself round barks and broken boughs, touching the boles of the trees and the low denuded branches, giving darkness and mystery form and substance.