Salt

by JeremyPage (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2008

  $24.13

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $3.46

  'These were the nights when the German bombers growled through the sky, their bellies full with steel and cordite. When the moon was low their dark shapes and still darker shadows came over the coast. Several hours later they'd return again, wearily, lighter in weight, fewer in number, dropping the occasional bomb on the forgotten land of creeks and channels beneath them. On one of those nights it all began for me - war, after all, starts many things, and even though I wasn't born for another twenty-five years, my story began there.' It is May 1945 and as church bells ring out Victory in Europe over the Norfolk saltmarshes, Goose's daughter Lil is born. But as Lil enters Goose's world, her father leaves it, in a makeshift boat bound - or so the story goes - for Germany, his home. Forty years later it is Lil's son, Pip, who begins to make sense of his family's fragmented history. Who was his grandfather, who fell from the sky into Goose's life and then disappeared as suddenly as he came? What was the truth of his mother, Lil, who lived and lost her way between the creeks and the samphire? And what does it all mean for Pip, whose heritage of flood, fireworks, fish and clouds, has left him ill-prepared for life beyond the marshes?

• Used

  Hardcover
  2007

  $4.89

  Every story heads towards tragedy, given the time. 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? Salt is a brilliantly evocative novel about madness, landscape and family myth.