Salt - Softcover

Page, Jeremy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141027703 ISBN 13: 9780141027708

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2008

Synopsis

'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?

About this title

About the Author

Jeremy Page works as a scriptwriter and, until recently, worked for FilmFour as a script editor. He lives in London and this his first novel.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This remarkable first novel by British script editor Page elevates a tragic family history to the level of myth. In the dying months of the Second World War Goose, a strange, isolated woman who reads omens in the clouds and lives alone in a cottage on the salt marshes of Norfolk, England, finds a German soldier partially buried in the marsh mud. She takes him in, he gets her pregnant and then he flees (on a makeshift boat featuring a quilt for a sail) while she's in labor. Daughter Lil, who grows up wild and strange, becomes the love interest of two brothers (named Shrimp and Kipper) and leaves the marshes in shame at age 16. The story is told through the eyes of Pip, Lil's son, whose inability (or unwillingness) to speak draws Lil and husband George back to the marshes and to Goose. The unforgiving landscape becomes one of the book's main characters; it's a ruthless, powerful force that claims Pip's family members one at a time. But it is Pip's infatuation with Elsie, an odd girl a few years his senior, that will have the direst consequences of all. Page has reinvented the fairy tale with this disturbing and magical saga. (July)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0141027703
• ISBN 13: 9780141027708
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336