The Salvage
‘A gothic tale with a powerful sense of place and an eerie atmosphere’ Sunday Times
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
'A gothic tale with a powerful sense of place and an eerie atmosphere'
The Sunday Times, Best New Historical Fiction
'A heady, entertaining brew...asks questions about guilt, superstition, desire, power, and historical inheritance'
Scotland on Sunday
It is 1962, and Marta Khoury, a trail-blazing marine archaeologist, has travelled to Cairnroch, a small island off the east coast of Scotland. An Arctic shipwreck containing the remains of a famous Victorian explorer has been towed back to the island at the behest of his wealthy descendants. Marta's job is to retrieve valuable artefacts from the vessel, deep beneath the freezing Scottish waters. But on her first dive, she becomes convinced she has seen a ghostly figure lurking in the wreckage.
When Marta discovers objects from the vessel have inexplicably disappeared, she must work to uncover their whereabouts before her boss - who is also her ex-husband - discovers their absence. As a series of unsettling and strange occurrences begins to unfold, Marta's work trip turns into a long winter as the worst snowstorms of the century sweep in and trap the islanders, and their ghosts, in an icy wilderness.
'With her signature wit and unflinching eye for historical detail Anbara Salam brings a remote Scottish island chillingly to life. The Salvage plumbs the icy depths of memory and colonialism and explores whether love can survive in the frostiest of outposts' Francine Toon, bestselling author of Pine and Bluff
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Salam's chilling latest (after Hazardous Spirits), a Scottish marine archaeologist fears she's encountered a ghost while exploring a Victorian shipwreck off the coast of a remote island. Marta Khoury, riddled with grief and guilt after the drowning death of her illicit lover, Lewis, travels from Edinburgh to the island of Cairnroch in December 1962. The Purdie family has hired her to search the underwater wreckage of the HMS Deliverance, their ancestor's ship, recently discovered in the Arctic Ocean and dragged back to a port on the island. During her first dive, she sees a skulking figure inside the Deliverance and fears it's Lewis, who also hailed from Cairnroch. Terrified, she resolves to leave the island as soon as possible. Back on land, the heirlooms she recovered from the wreck inexplicably disappear, and the Purdie lighthouse burns down. As Marta hunts for the stolen artifacts, she's viewed derisively as an outsider and even banished from a shelter during a nuclear bomb scare. Meanwhile, a deep snow settles over the island, isolating it from the mainland. Salam sustains a sense of dread and keeps readers guessing as to whether Marta is truly haunted by a ghost or simply overcome by very real human threats. Fans of neo-gothic fiction ought to check this out.
