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Maybe someday
47
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
51/100Critics
43/100Scholars
Author:
Lamorna Ash
Publisher:
Bloomsbury Publishing
Date:
December 1, 2020
Before arriving in Newlyn, a Cornish fishing village at the end of the railway line, Lamorna Ash was told that no fisherman would want a girl joining an expedition. Weeks later, the only female on board a trawler called the Filadelfia, she is heading out to sea with the dome of the sky above and the black waves below.
What The Reviewers Say
Dark, Salt, Clear , melds history, literature and the highly personal into something far more complex and compelling than the 'evocative journey replete with poetry' of the publisher’s blurb. W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn becomes Ash’s lodestar.
Dark, Salt, Clear is an extraordinary debut, a deeply researched and deeply felt work of narrative nonfiction. It is the kind of book that ziplines readers to a different world.
Part coming-of-age memoir, part anthropological study, Dark, Salt, Clear glistens with deftly told snippets and character-rich stories: about the habits of fish and the art of catching them; about the bifurcating life of sea and shore; about 'salt-licked winds' and squawking seabirds; and, perhaps most poignantly, about Lamorna Ash herself, the 'emmet' or outsider, who so desperately desires to belong.
Ash, who now works for an educational charity, has done her homework. As well as sea words, she peppers her narrative with history, from Cornwall’s origin story and tales of various fish riots, to how pilchard fishing was revived in 1981 when the entrepreneur Nick Howell bought the Newlyn Pilchards Works.
