Katherine Mullen faces a commonplace tragedy.  After twenty years of marriage her husband leaves her for a younger woman and she must try to construct a new life for herself and her two teenage children.

After the divorce, she determines to move away from London and to start afresh in the west county.  Gradually she establishes herself in her new community, discovering a new way of living both in terms of village life and of her dawning understanding of herself as an independent person.  That understanding has to do with taking risks – the kind of risks that would not have occurred to her while she was married and content with that security.

Accordingly she allows into her life a young man given to casual relationships, who finds in Kate a seductive maturity.  Their affair ends naturally though painfully for Kate; and it represents for her a freedom that points towards the kind of self-knowledge and self-fulfilment that she seeks.  Inevitably, it makes possible an altogether more serious and more complicated involvement.  A greater risk.

The risk, of course, is love, and it is a cruelly logical irony that the man Kate comes to love is locked into a marriage based on familiarity and inertia, like that from which she was unwillingly ejected.  Once more, she finds herself faced with the tensions and dilemmas of an attachment that really matter to her.  The decision she makes, and the effect of this on her life and the lives of those close to her, proves her hard-won self-confidence and understanding of her own emotional resilience.

In Kate Mullen, Susan Barrett has created a woman of our times – someone honest and self-critical, open to experience but loyal to her own sense of morality. 

 "efficiently and sensitively done, with an expertly orchestrated supporting cast" Observer

"The plot sounds ordinary and everyday which it is.  What lifts 'The Beacon' onto a higher plane is Susan Barrett's understanding of people." Martyn Goff, Daily Telegraph