The Shell Seekers

The Shell Seekers is a novel by the English writer Rosamunde Pilcher, published in 1987.

Its central figure is Penelope Keeling, the daughter of an artist and his young French wife, who is in her sixties when the book opens and has come out of hospital to recover in the house she grew up in. The novel moves between her present situation, in which her three adult children have opinions about what should happen to the paintings and the house, and the earlier life that produced her: her parents' unconventional marriage, her own marriage and the years of the war. The book was one of the best-selling novels of its decade, was adapted for television twice and was nominated by the British public for the BBC's list of best-loved novels in 2003, and its reputation rests on the way it handles ordinary family life over a long span rather than on any single event.

Pilcher had been writing for decades before this novel, and it was the one that made her name outside Britain as well as in it.