Search results for ""salt publishing""
Salt Publishing The Redemption of Galen Pike: and Other Stories
Winner of the 2015 International Frank O’Connor Short Story AwardWinner of the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered PrizeShortlisted for the 2015 Wales Book of the Year: FictionShortlisted for the 2015 Edge Hill Short Story PrizeThe Globe 100: The Best International Fiction of 2017In a remote Australian settlement a young wife with an untellable secret reluctantly invites her neighbour into her home. A Quaker spinster offers companionship to a condemned man in a Colorado jail. In the ice and snows of Siberia an office employee from Birmingham witnesses a scene that will change her life. At a jubilee celebration in a northern English town a middle-aged alderman opens his heart to Queen Victoria. A teenage daughter leaves home in search of adventure. High in the Cumbrian fells a woman seeks help from her father’s enemy.Spare, precise, charged with a prickly wit, the stories in Carys Davies's sparkling second collection remind us how little we know of the lives of others.
£10.99
Salt Publishing Scablands and Other Stories
These are tales from the post-industrial scablands – stories of austerity, poverty, masochism and migration. The people here are sick, lonely, lost, half-living in the aftermath of upheaval or trauma. A teacher obsessively canes himself. A neurologist forgets where home is. A starving woman sells hugs in an abandoned kiosk. Yet sometimes, even in the twilit scablands, there’s also beauty, music, laughter. Sometimes a town square is filled with bubbles. Sometimes sisters dream they can fly. Sometimes an old man plays Bach to an empty street, two ailing actors see animal shapes in clouds, a cancer survivor searches for a winning lottery ticket in her rundown flat. And sometimes Gustav Mahler lives just round the corner, hoarding rare records in a Stoke terrace.
£9.99
Salt Publishing my name is abilene
Sennitt Clough's twisty fen-Gothic narratives are filled with macabre imagery and sexual violence. imagine a monstrous fair that has arrived in deepest Cambridgshire, only to discover that the inhabitants are far more frightening than the carnival. Rich in symbolism and mythology, it's a thrilling read that will leave your mind as black as peat.
£10.99
Salt Publishing Eastmouth and Other Stories
Alison Moore’s debut collection, The Pre-War House and Other Stories, gathered together stories written prior to the publication of her first novel.‘The tales collected in The Pre-War House… pick at psychological scabs in a register both wistful and brutal.’ —Anthony Cummins, The Times Literary Supplement‘Moore’s writing is surprising and exact and culminates in the title story, the novella which brings the collection to a powerful crescendo’ —The Arkansas International‘just as uncompromising and unsettling as The Lighthouse… Moore’s distinctive voice commands exceptional power’ —Dinah Birch, The GuardianEastmouth and Other Stories is her second collection, featuring stories published in the subsequent decade, including stories that have appeared in Best British Short Stories, Best British Horror and Best New Horror, as well as new, unpublished work.
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Salt Publishing How To Be a Kosovan Bride
Longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2018How to be a Kosovan Bride opens up something entirely new to the reader: the history, culture and stories of one of the newest countries in the world. It weaves together Albanian folktale, stories of Kosovan experience of the war in 1999 and a look into the lives of modern-day Kosovan women. The dark undercurrent of Albanian blood feuds underpins a story about the impact of war and the way that new life can emerge from darkness.It is characterised by striking imagery and daring form.
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Salt Publishing The Knife Drawer
Shortlisted for The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2012In the house where Marie lives, the cutlery is running wild …Madness and fairy story creep hand in hand in this darkly comic tale. At the top of a narrow driveway there is a shambling Victorian house full of dust and stairs. The walls inside are ancient emulsion, sloughing off the distemper walls in gorgeous ribbons.The mice that infest the dining room chimney-breast are living out their own dreams and nightmares, learning voodoo and the meaning of love and forgiveness. In The Knife Drawer, dead bodies miraculously vanish as if scraped to nothing by pudding spoons. Marie’s mother has rather lost her wits since she did away with her husband. She could swear they’re out to get her; even the house gets messy on purpose, all by itself. Marie’s twin is living in a hole in the back-garden, small and round as a cherry pip, waiting to be discovered.In The Knife Drawer the steak knives grow so hungry that they scream. When the children murder the rent man, things get a little out of hand …
£11.99
Salt Publishing Odalisque
Odalisque employs the lyric poem to achieve a complicated and layered narrative. It is, on the surface, the story of an L.A.P.D. bomb squad detective who falls for a street hooker. This transgression leads to his dismissal from the force, but it is only one of many instances in the book of “stepping over the line.” There is also the story of a “scrivener” and an “odalisque,” which is interleaved with the cop’s story and is simultaneous with it. Indeed, it seems as if there are the same story, read as palimpsests of each other. The events are not so much set in Los Angeles as imbedded in it, because the city, with its free-floating mythologies of fame, immigration, identity, and transformation, are central to the tale. However, in Odalisque, the mythology does not match up with the reality, and the characters find themselves strung up “between seeming and being.” The book reads as one long poem presented in 14-line panels or tableaux.
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Salt Publishing Sunny and the Hotel Splendid
On the hottest day of the year, Ana Sharma and her mum check in to the Hotel Splendid, a place where bells seem to ring all by themselves, jam pots and milk jugs appear on the breakfast table as if by magic, and things go bump in the night. The Hotel Splendid has a problem. When Ana and Sunny meet, they come up with a solution, but one problem leads to another. Meanwhile, the hotel is harbouring an unexpected guest …
£6.29
Salt Publishing Best British Short Stories 2023
Inspired by Giles Gordon and David Hughes’s Best Short Stories series, which ran to ten volumes between 1986 and 1995, Best British Short Stories this year reaches its thirteenth volume.Best British Short Stories 2023 showcases an excellent and varied selection of stories, by British writers, first published during 2022 in magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks and online.This new anthology contains stories by Alinah Azadeh, David Bevan, AK Blakemore, Gabriel Flynn, Jim Gibson, Lydia Gill, Miles Greenwood, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Philip Jennings, Sharon Kivland, Alison Moore, Georgina Parfitt, Gareth E Rees, Leone Ross, John Saul, DJ Taylor, Briony Thompson, Matthew Turner, Mark Valentine and David Wheldon.
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Salt Publishing Scenes from Life on Earth
Addressing the loss of the poet’s mother – as well as themes of motherhood, birth, death, and the natural world – Scenes from Life on Earth explores how we grieve and remember those we love. Simmonds continues to write through the prism of her faith, offering insights and wisdom on the circuit of life, of life’s endings, and the promise of reconciliation.
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Salt Publishing The Missing
Winner Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for PoetryShortlisted for The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection Forward Poetry Prizes 2009Poetry Bank Choice and Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 2006 ‘The Send-Off’, an elegy for a lost child, was broadcast on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 and the issues it raised – ante-natal testing, grief, guilt, the family, women’s lives – raged on for weeks in blogs and notice boards. But no one wondered what the poem was about. It was crystal clear. The poems in Sian Hughes debut collection, The Missing are direct and emotional. They do not hide behind imagery. They deal head on with the heart of shame, with parenting, illness, loss, regret and falling in love with the wrong people.
£9.04
Salt Publishing Liminal
Morning Star Best of 2018: FictionEsther, a pregnant amputee, and her husband, Dan, are seeking a new life, setting up home – restoring an abandoned railway station called Rosgill, far away in the Scottish Highlands.Spanning the course of a week, Bee Lewis’s gothic fantasia follows Esther as her marriage, life and body begin to dramatically change. By day, she is isolated physically and mentally within her marriage and her new environment. By night, she explores a forbidding forest, pursued by a shadowy figure.Symbolism, dreams and violence abound in this spellbinding unsnaring of a soul.
£9.99
Salt Publishing The White Road and Other Stories
What links a café in Antarctica, a factory for producing electronic tracking tags and a casino where gamblers can wager their shoes? They're among the multiple venues where award-winning writer Tania Hershman sets her unique tales in this spellbinding debut collection. Fleeing from tragedy, a bereaved mother opens a cafe on the road to the South Pole. A town which has always suffered extreme cold enjoys sudden warmth. A stranger starts plaiting a young woman's hair. A rabbi comes face to face with an angel in a car park. An elderly woman explains to her young carer what pregnancy used to mean before science took over. A middle-aged housewife overcomes a fear of technology to save her best friend. A desperate childless woman resorts to extreme measures to adopt. A young man's potential is instantly snuffed out by Nature's whims. A lonely widow bakes cakes in the shape of test tubes and DNA. A number of these stories are inspired by articles from science magazines, taking fact as their starting points and wondering what might happen if . . .? In these surreal, lyrical stories, many of which are only a few pages long, Tania Hershman allows her imagination free reign, as her characters navigate through love, death, friendship, spirituality, mental illness and the havoc wreaked by the weather.
£8.99
Salt Publishing The Manet Girl
The stories in The Manet Girl explore sexual relations – from both male and female points of view – in the present, but sometimes with a backdrop of several decades. Stories of desire and confusion – other men and other women – sit alongside stories of art – galleries, studios, allusions to painters – which gets in the way as least as often as it illuminates. Choices are made, in the knowledge that distractions may be the most important things of all.
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Salt Publishing The Snowboy
Mark Burnhope's poems present a generous but moral quizzing of the world. Peering out over disability, faith and the host of prejudices that spring from such ground, they negotiate a path through lyricism and music, didacticism and narrative, comedy and confession, slang and slur in their search for a voice with which to speak. They visit town and sea, husband and wife and monuments to grief built of snow, steel, stone. They take us to a hydrotherapy session, a talking tree and an outcast crew including Pinocchio, Queequeg and Quasimodo. But at their heart, there is great warmth. Burnhope asks uncomfortable questions of the rhyme or reason for loss and healing, even as he challenges received perceptions of disabled life with wit, verve and an inclusive imagination.
£7.48
Salt Publishing The Frost Fairs
Winner of the 2012 Polari PrizeA Book of the Year for The Independent and The Poetry SchoolHoliday Read in The ObserverThe Frost Fairs is a compassionate book with a global and historical scope, tackling science and city life from a range of surreal yet poignant angles. It explores love in many forms, from modern transatlantic relationships to hidden gay and cross-gendered lives from the past. The pieces travel from ancient Alexandria to twenty-first century bars and council estates, behind everything the vastness of the sea and sky. The array of voices here is striking: taxi drivers report their most outlandish fares and hermaphrodite statues flirt with observers; abandoned lovers watch frost fairs melting on the Thames and drag queens revel in the freedoms afforded by the Blitz. Formally deft and carefully crafted, this diverse range of poems uses language that is always musical and alive. Surprise and the uncanny are cherished as ways of returning to us the strange leaps and enduring power of our deepest yearnings. In this collection, longing and losing condition all we see and hear, making the impossible suddenly plausible. Whether exploring Brighton seascapes or questions of empire, there is always in McCullough’s writing an openness to seeing the world from an alternative point of view. At once bold and haunting, The Frost Fairs opens the door to a new country in the reader’s imagination in its exploration of the possibilities of the human heart.
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Salt Publishing Melting Point
Melting Point fuses prose and poetry, realism and literary inventiveness, in dealing with the absurdity of humanity. Its fourteen stories embrace a dizzying variety of genres: hyperrealism, sci-fi, the Gothic and melodrama, all subtly re-invented. The most striking thing about Magarian’s collection is its range of interests, the multiplicity of the worlds evoked, and the extreme contrasts among its characters: a feted, reclusive writer; a seductive murderess with a fondness for Bourbon; a thief obsessed with a Toulouse-Lautrec print; a fruit and vegetable merchant who has a genius toddler; and a deep-sea diver who can only be free from clumsiness when she is submerged in water.Stories and characters flow from these molten moments in a series of fictions that touch on ecstasy and excess.
£9.99
Salt Publishing The Departure
Shortlisted for the EDP-Jarrold East Anglian Book AwardsAt the centre of Emery’s third collection are a series of narrative poems that reveal an astonishing range of personas, from the set of Mission Impossible, an extra from Gojira, porn stars, bombers and executioners — even Charles Bukowski turns up to take a leak. There are Pennine journeys, war zones, the Norfolk coast, the Suffolk coast, riots, bad hotel rooms and crazy conventions. Even the secret life of peas. Interspersed among all these are poems concerning the mysterious ‘M’.
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Salt Publishing Dry Cleaning
A hot summer. The countryside around Manchester is ablaze. Ethan Mallam is fresh out of prison and finds his old gang locked in a brutal civil war. Against his wishes, he is quickly drawn into a hellish world of fire, blood, greed, and Billy Bear Ham. Trevor Mark Thomas's follow up to the sensational, and sensationally gripping, The Bothy.
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Salt Publishing Nameless Lake
‘It’s a brilliant novel, I think, so sharply observed and so even handed in its treatment of the sexes.’ —Patrick GaleNameless Lake is about the unspoken pressures of gender and desire, told through the shifting dynamics of a lifelong friendship. Emma and Madryn grow up with dreams of escaping their seaside hometown, sustained by an obsession with photography and secret acts of vandalism. But adulthood brings its own limitations, and Emma yearns for connection beyond the constraints of her family. Drawn deeper into Madryn’s private life, Emma feels new possibilities awakening within herself, but when Madryn faces a backlash from her controlling partner, Emma must finally break out of her role as passive observer.
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Salt Publishing Sawn-Off Tales
David Gaffney’s compact, surreal tales are filled with poignancy and wit. Each story goes off like a tiny depth charge in the mind, leaving you with the trace memory of some new urban myth – comic, absurd and disturbingly true.
£9.99
Salt Publishing Snegurochka
Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing AwardsLonglisted for the Not the Booker Prize 2019‘Something terrible is happening here. Something terrible has already happened.’Kiev 1992. Rachel, a troubled young English mother, joins her journalist husband on his first foreign posting in the city. Terrified of the apartment's balcony, she develops obsessive rituals to keep their baby safe. Her difficulties expose her to a disturbing endgame between the elderly caretaker and a local racketeer who sends a gift that surely comes with a price. Rachel is isolated yet culpable with her secrets and estrangements. As consequences bear down she seeks out Zoya, her husband's fixer, and the boy from upstairs who watches them all.Home is uncertain, betrayal is everywhere, but in the end there are many ways to be a mother.
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Salt Publishing The Manchester Trilogy: Book 2
In this, the second volume of a projected Manchester trilogy, the young writer takes a zero-hours job in a mail-sorting depot but struggles to cope with the demands of menial work and the attitudes of his colleagues. Only after rescuing and acquiring a pet tortoise does he realise what is most lacking in his life: intimacy. Embarking on a handful of sexual misadventures, he continues to struggle as a writer. He sees the city in which he was born and brought up changing all around him and, when he gets sacked from the sorting office, some hard choices lie ahead.A powerful indictment of austerity politics and Brexit Britain, the novel never loses sight of its working-class characters’ dignity and humanity, and Campbell’s mordantly witty dialogue ensures that the next laugh is never far away. Gripping in its fascination with the everyday, Zero Hours is keenly observed, blackly funny and ultimately uplifting.
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Salt Publishing The Pastoraclasm
Departing from Virgil’s Eclogues, The Pastoraclasm is an urgent environmental address to humans, nature and vegetable gardens. During pandemic lockdowns, poet John Kinsella realised that he would have to garden not because he enjoys it but because his family, who live ‘in the bush, would need whatever he could grow. Fierce summers, fire danger, and only having access to rainwater tank water — refusing to drain the aquifer further by using one of the two bores at ‘Jam Tree Gully’, reinforced the realisation that gardening needs to be a careful negotiation with the limitations of time, place and conditions of presence. What developed was a set of dialogues with the garden, and with the endemic plants and animals that surrounded it. Searching for a decolonising antipastoral ‘eclogue’, the poet continues his decades-long practice of investigating the nature of ‘pastoral’ and its failure to translate into the Australian environment/s. Writing to a poet in Wales, Kinsella said: ‘We’re in regional lockdown here, and trying to grow veggies in drought conditions. Lot of silvereyes, thornbills and gerygones out there today – overcast, which is unusual at the moment (still very hot), and that has them vigorous with hope, I guess... but no rain predicted. On emergency water supplies now.’ In this cycle of eco-eclogues, a counter-pastoral of responsibility emerges – one that acknowledges the toxic impact of colonialism, and which seeks to address human rapacity through challenging consumerism and industrialism and offering an ‘alternative’ way of living. As garden and gardener, soul and self, all speak with each other, they are conscious of how close fire and other catastrophes are, and together they try to evoke a healing and a path through to justice for the biosphere. Known for his wide variety of poetic approaches and techniques, this collection is very much about utterance, place and a belief that there are no easy garden metaphors, that garden’s are also spaces of responsibility.
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Salt Publishing The Electric Dwarf
A ‘Withnail’ for the twenty-first centuryTim Vine’s satirical thriller appears to revolve around the dysfunctional lives of Norman and Peter – the latter becoming an accidental terrorist. Driven by his warped religious tendencies and mental illness, Peter is encouraged by none other than the singer Rick Astley, who instructs and leads him during the most excellent recurring dreams.Along the bizarre journey we explore a cult, infidelity, drug abuse, frustration, extremism, all tinged by a strong awareness of the weirdness of late-Capitalist society.
£9.99
Salt Publishing Magnus
In Magnus we enter the world of heroes and villains, gods and monsters, good and evil. With a twist, of course, as one would expect from the author of The Book of Alexander.Per, Jonas, Mette and Linnéa are university undergraduates on their final year project with Professor Erik Nordveit. Magnus is the unwelcome guest, a student of grotesque appearance with a shady past who must complete the project to be awarded a pass degree. The group will live together for one week in a cabin on the remote island of Svindel off the west coast of Norway. The pressure cooker atmosphere soon increases – who will explode first? Who can really concentrate on monitoring environmental pollution under these conditions, when there is no contact with the mainland?What starts as the capstone of their university careers, slowly becomes more difficult for the Professor and the students. Events take a turn for the worse. True natures are revealed. Is there a need in all of us to escape, to maximise our freedom, to be ourselves? Do we naturally split into two sides and become either heroes or monsters? Can people truly govern themselves without laws and force of arms?The week culminates in a bonfire party to celebrate Midsummer’s Eve. The neighbouring islands light beacons to celebrate the longest day with the sun still in the sky. In its hour of need who will answer Svindel’s call? Are heroes made or born?
£9.99
Salt Publishing The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times
Shortlisted for the 2017 Costa First Novel AwardShortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2018Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2018Longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical FictionNew Faces of Fiction 2017, ObserverObserver Fiction to look out for in 2017The Irish Times What To Look Out for in 2017 from Independent PublishersJen Campbell’s ‘Most Anticipated Books of 2017’Jean Bookish Thoughts ‘Most Anticipated Releases of 2017’A dark social-realist fairytale, spotlighting the shadowy underside of 1920s EnglandSummer 1923: the modern world. Orphaned Lucy Marsh climbs into the back of an old army truck and is whisked off to the woods north of London – a land haunted by the past, where lost souls and monsters conceal themselves in the trees.In a sunlit clearing she meets the ‘funny men’, a quartet of disfigured ex-soldiers named after Dorothy’s companions in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Here are the loved and the damaged, dark forests and darker histories, and the ever-present risk of discovery and violent retribution. Xan Brooks’ stunning debut is heartbreaking, disturbing and redemptive.
£9.04