Cold Fish Soup
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- €8.49
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE 2021 NORTHBOUND BOOK AWARD
'Adam Farrer is a bold new voice in nonfiction writing. His keen observations are as gentle as they are wry, as attentive to the bleak truths of loss and deprivation as they are to the eccentric humour of humans being entirely themselves ... Witty, charming, moving and real.' Jenn Ashworth
Before Adam Farrer’s family relocated to Withernsea in 1992, he’d never heard of the Holderness coast. The move represented one thing to Adam: a chance to leave the insecurities of early adolescence behind. And he could do that anywhere. What he didn’t know was how much he’d grow to love the quirks and people of this faded Yorkshire resort, in spite of its dilapidated attractions and retreating clifftops.
While Adam documents the minutiae of small-town life, he lays bare experiences that are universal. His insights on family, friendship, male mental health and suicide are revealed in stories of reinvention, rapacious seagulls, interdimensional werewolves, burlesque dancing pensioners, and his compulsion towards the sea.
Cold Fish Soup is an affectionate look at a place and its inhabitants, and the ways in which they can shape and influence someone, especially of an impressionable age. Adam’s account explores what it means to love and be shaped by a place that is under threat, and the hope – and hilarity – that can be found in community.
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.)
