Dark, Salt, Clear
The Life of a Fishing Town
-
-
3.7 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
From an adventurous and discerning new voice reminiscent of Robert Macfarlane, a captivating portrait of a community eking out its living in a coastal landscape as stark and storied as it is beautiful.
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.
Newlyn is a town of dramatic cliffs, crashing tides, and hardcore career fishermen-complex and difficult heroes who slowly open up to Ash about their lives and frustrations, first in the condensed space of the boat, and then in the rough pubs ashore. Determined to know the community on its own terms, Ash lodges in a spare room by the harbor and lets the village wash over her in all of its clamoring unruliness, thumping machinery, and tangled nets-its history, dialect, and centuries-old industry.
Moving between Ash's surprising, transformational journey aboard the Filadelfia and her astute observations of Newlyn's landscape and people, Dark, Salt, Clear is an assured work of indelible characters and a multilayered travelogue through a landscape both lovely and merciless. Ash's adventurous glint, her delicate observations, and her willingness to get under the skin of a place call to mind the work of Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and Robert Macfarlane. This is an evocative journey and a fiercely auspicious debut.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. Introducing locals both down-to-earth, such as Roger, a grieving retired geologist, and eccentric, such as self-styled "Duchess of Newlyn" Pat, Ash succeeds in bringing the town vividly to life. While Ash explains her connection to the area her mother grew up nearby and named her for local landmark Lamorna Cove she shows how she gained a new understanding of it through firsthand experience with the fishing industry that provides Newlyn's lifeblood. Her activities include observing fish graders rate a catch for auction, riding along on crab-fishing dayboats, and taking a weeklong voyage on a trawler, at the end of which she at last feels like a member of the community. Writing that "the consumer can know nothing of the pranks, the storms and the struggles that their weekly fish supper has been privy to," Ash leaves readers with a lasting impression of the toil, elation, and sadness faced by her subjects. Ash's remarkably empathetic take on a small town and its outsized contribution to the fishing industry is one to savor.
