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.

While Ash feels a deep connection with the men who spend their days at sea, she doesn’t shy away from the complicated truth of their lives.

Dark, Salt, Clear is so soaked through with the sea, and fishing, that its pages almost feel damp to the touch, in the same way that cotton sheets do in seaside homes. And Ash is an exciting new talent. A mature voice. And a humble one. Not afraid to channel the insights of those who have gone before her – Lopez, Didion, Woolf, Thoreau..

In writing a book about a particular area, it helps to be named after a town there. 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.

Making an engaging book debut, Ash offers a gently told memoir recounting several extended visits to Newlyn, a Cornwall fishing village to which she feels 'unwittingly bound'.

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.