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I don’t usually recommend hard back books for the obvious reason but there are two books for which I just couldn’t wait until they come out in soft covers. One of them is The Dig by Robert Preston, a fictional account of the pre-war excavation at Sutton Hoo which I will introduce in more detail in next month’s column. The other is Salt by Jeremy Page which is this months offering.
The basics first. Salt is a book set in the Norfolk Fens and the marshes near Blakeney which was first published earlier this year by Viking. It is the debut novel of Jeremy Page who is a script editor for Film Four and a script writer. The Penguin website describes the book as ‘a brilliantly evocative novel about madness, landscape and family myth.’ And provides the following synopsis
‘A man is found buried up to his neck in the thick mud of the Norfolk saltmarshes, by a woman gathering samphire. Nine months later, as the bells ring out the end of the Second World War, he vanishes in a makeshift boat, leaving a newborn daughter, Lil, in his wake. A childhood under the wide sky of the marshes, Lil’s life is singled out from the start as being strange. Taught by her mother to read the clouds, she lives a curious existence on a land so often overrun by the sea. But when, as a teenager, she becomes the object of two brothers’ desire, her life begins to spiral out of control.Forty years later it is Lil’s son, Pip, who attempts to makes sense of his family’s intriguing history. Coastal living has formed them, made them extraordinary, and is killing them off. But will the past repeat itself and is Pip, like his forebears, beginning to lose his own way between the creeks and the samphire?’
I recently met a teacher who was studying this book with her sixth form students and she simply called it ‘ wonderful’. Rachel Hore has written that ‘With Salt the regional novel has recruited a powerful new voice.’ It is, however, not an easy novel to read and to quote from Rachel Hore again the’ boundary between fact and fiction, like the viscous marsh between land and sea, is undoubtedly territory the author wishes to excavate, but there are moments when the reader is in danger of sinking.’ But those moments are worth scrambling away from and the book is worth re-reading and re-reading.
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