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Dark, Salt, Clear: The Life of a Fishing Town

Dark, Salt, Clear: The Life of a Fishing Town

by Lamorna Ash

Bloomsbury Publishing ·2020 ·336 pages ·History
Near the Top
Near the Top
I Index
56/99
Near the Top

64/99

Critics

Maybe Someday

49/99

Readers

n/a

Scholars

50/99

Rating

77/99

Volume

52/99

Rating

46/99

Volume

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About This Book

There is the Cornwall Lamorna Ash knew as a child - the idyllic, folklore-rich place where she spent her summer holidays. Then there is the Cornwall she discovers when, feeling increasingly dislocated in London, she moves to Newlyn, a fishing town near Land's End. This Cornwall is messier and harder; it doesn't seem like a place that would welcome strangers. But before long, Lamorna finds herself on a week-long trawler trip with a crew of local fishermen, afforded a rare glimpse into their world, their warmth and their humour. Out on the water, miles from the coast, she learns how fishing requires you to confront who you are and what it is that tethers you to the land. Dark, Salt, Clear is a bracing journey of discovery and a captivating portrait of a community sustained and defined by the sea for centuries.


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Reviews

"When she turns to issues such as quota revisions or Brexit (which has near-universal support in fishing communities), Ash does so not in facts and figures but via the lived realities of the fishermen ..."

Oliver Balch· Financial Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Her direct accounts are wadded between allusions to Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Herman Melville and others, and a mass of detailed local history, mined deeply and purposefully ..."

Ruth Guilding· Times Literary Supplement Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Playwright Ash turns a curious and empathetic eye on the small fishing village of Newlyn in Cornwall, England, weaving history, myth, and memoir into a gripping and affecting debut ..."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Ash captures the color and rhythms of a close-knit community where life, livelihood, and death center on the sea ..."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Lamorna Ash revisits Cornwall, the wild area in the southwest of England, which is her mother's ancestral home, in this accomplished and vividly written first book ..."

Elissa Greenwald· The New York Journal of Books Read review ↗ Near the Top

"It is the kind of book that ziplines readers to a different world ..."

Heller McAlpin· The Wall Street Journal Read review ↗ Near the Top

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