Cold Fish Soup
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Echoing the canny writing of David Sedaris, Farrer has a knack for wringing hilarity from life’s grim moments … this meditation on the beauty of impermanence charms.” Publishers Weekly
Cold Fish Soup is a series of meditations, often humorous, about life and death in a crumbling, forgotten English seaside town, and how people can find sanctuary and curious tales in the most unexpected places.
Before teenager Adam Farrer relocated with his family to Withernsea in 1992, he’d never heard of this isolated, faded seaside town in a down-trodden part of Yorkshire, northern England. The move represented just one thing to him: a chance to leave the insecurities of adolescence behind. He could do that anywhere. But he didn’t anticipate how much he’d grow to love the quirks of the town, nor care about its eroding cliffs and declining high street.
Cold Fish Soup is an affectionate look at a place and its inhabitants—and the ways in which they can shape and influence someone throughout their life. Drawing on his own experience, Adam shares stories from adolescence to adulthood of reinvention, male mental health and suicide, friendship, interdimensional werewolves, burlesque dancing pensioners, and his compulsion toward the sea.
In this personal, insightful, and funny account, Adam explores the power of community and what it means to love and be shaped by a place that is running out of time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British writer Farrer sifts through amusing anecdotes of his life in a small English seaside town in his witty and introspective debut. After enduring a gauntlet of bullying and quashed romantic dreams in high school, the author moved with his family in 1992 to Withernsea, a coastal resort town distinguished from the others around it by its "crumbling cliffs." While decrepit and desolate, the coastline—"fragile and perilous, built of soft, vulnerable clay"—occasions moving reflections from Farrer on his own tenuous constitution and lifelong struggles with depression ("crushed under the vice-like pressures of my own dedicated portion of collapsing sky"), the loss of his brother to suicide, and his efforts to reinvent himself as a rock star in college. Punctuating his elegiac narrative are colorful sketches of his family—most memorably his mother, whose burlesque troupe made the semifinals of Britain's Got Talent in 2015—juxtaposed with Farrer's vivid evocations of the landscape of his youth: "I'd been told that when the graveyards fell, skeletons appeared on the cliff face, poking out like chunks of hazelnut in a chocolate bar." Echoing the canny writing of David Sedaris, Farrer has a knack for wringing hilarity from life's grim moments; however, his sardonic humor occasionally stands in the way of deeper insights. Even still, this meditation on the beauty of impermanence charms. (Oct.)
