Salt and Skin
'Brilliant. With such a good ending, it had me slapping the back cover closed with utmost satisfaction and respect. Hard recommend' Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites and Devotion
Luda, a photographer, and her two teenagers arrive in the Scottish Northern Isles to make a new life. Everywhere the past shimmers to the surface; the shifting landscapes and wild weather dominates; the line between reality and the uncanny seems thin here.
The teenagers forge connections, making friends of neighbours, discovering both longing and dangerous compulsions. But their mother - fallible, obsessive, distracted - comes up hard against suspicion. The persecution and violence that drove the island's historic witch trials still simmers today, in isolated homes and church buildings, and where folklore and fact intertwine.
A compelling and magically immersive novel about a family on the edge and a community ensnared by history, that gathers to an unforgettable ending.
Book details
- Format
- Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781914613364
- Published
- 6 July 2023
- Pages
- 368
- Duration
- Dimensions
- 129 x 198 mm
- Genre
- Fiction
- Imprint
- September
Reviews
'Brilliant. With such a good ending, it had me slapping the back cover closed with utmost satisfaction and respect. Hard recommend'
'An astonishingly rich and intricate exploration of loss, love, ambition and redemption set against a backdrop of local myth and ancient island history – not least the long shadow cast by the island’s notorious witch trials three centuries previously. As the island’s supernatural past bleeds ever more into its present, it builds to a furious and fitting climax. A thrilling read'
‘I adored this novel. It’s both memorable and mesmerising’
'Eliza Henry-Jones is a brilliant storyteller. In Salt and Skin she has conjured a world that is hauntingly alive: to the slippery intersections between past and present, body and spirit, the uncanny and the real; an entrancing story of loss, redemption and love'
'Salt & Skin is a thematically complex, hauntingly written book, rooted in the physicality of the landscape and populated by carefully crafted characters having conflicted relationships in which boundaries are continually probed and transgressed – between friends, parent and child, biographer and subject and possibly even this world and the next. The effect is compelling, and quite magical'
'Henry-Jones blends past and present, reality and magic into a compelling story loud with warning voices for our time'
'In delving into the history of witchcraft, Henry-Jones achieves the rare feat of incorporating magic realism into a modern story in a way that feels natural, inevitable'
