Saltwater

A Novel

By: Jessica Andrews

Narrated by: Natalie Ann Jamieson

Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

This "luminous" (The Observer) feminist coming-of-age novel captures in sensuous, blistering prose the richness and imperfection of the bond between a daughter and her mother.

It begins with our bodies.... Safe together in the violet dark, and yet already there are spaces beginning to open between us.

From that first salty, viscous connection, through the ups and downs of a working-class childhood in Northern England, the one constant in Lucy’s life has been her mother: comforting and mysterious, ferociously loving, tirelessly devoted, as much a part of Lucy as her own skin. Her lessons in womanhood shape Lucy’s appreciation for desire, her sense of duty as a caretaker, her hunger for a better, maybe reckless life.

At university, Lucy’s background sets her apart from her classmates and London, even as she struggles with the excruciating, slow separation from her mother. Her father goes missing just after she graduates; her shift into adulthood comes with the burden of choosing how much of her father’s trouble to take on. When her grandfather dies, she escapes to his tiny house in Donegal, a place where her mother once found happiness. There she will take a lover, live inside art and the past, and track back through her memories and her mother’s stories to make sense of her place in the world.

In "a stunning new voice in British literary fiction" (The Independent) that lays bare our raw, dark selves, Jessica Andrews’ debut honors the beauty, complexity, and mixed blessings of daughterhood. Intricately woven in lyrical vignettes, Saltwater is a coming-of-age novel about finding a way forward by looking back.

©2020 Jessica Andrews (P)2020 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"Gorgeous.... Andrews unspools Lucy’s coming-of-age story in short numbered fragments, prose poems that at first seem random and out of order, but build in a logical sequence all their own.... Andrews’s writing is transportingly voluptuous, conjuring tastes and smells and sounds like her literary godmother, Edna O’Brien.... It’s her mission, she has said, to tell the stories of working-class women." (Penelope Green, The New York Times Book Review)

"An audacious debut, an inventively told and intimate coming-of-age story." (Largehearted Boy)

"Written with delicate, soul-bearing temperament, followers of Zinzi Clemmons' What We Lose will fawn over Andrews’ warm-blooded coming-of-age debut concerning a young woman coming to grasp with the annals of her estranged upbringing." (Paris Close, Paperback Paris)

Disappointing

I Could not get into it . Found the reader was difficult to understand. Distracting format.