Memoir Salt

Just days after Raynor Winn learns that Moth, her husband of 32 years, is terminally ill, their house and farm are taken away, along with their livelihood. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, through Devon and Cornwall. Carrying only the essentials for survival on their backs, they live wild in the ancient, weathered landscape of cliffs, sea, and sky.

Sarah Gormley spent most of her life trying to outrun the persistent self-loathing that plagued her from childhood, convinced that self-worth was something she had to earn by doing rather than being. When she returned to Salt Creek Farm at age forty-five, Gormley had no idea that detaching from the success she believed defined her, untangling the complicated relationship with her mother, and continuing the hard work of therapy would lead to a wildly transformed life.

Joe Gere said he died on the afternoon his 12-year-old daughter Brenda disappeared. It was left to Brenda's mother Elaine to sustain her stricken family, search for her missing child, and pressure the authorities for justice. From the first minutes of the investigation, suspicion fell on Michael Kay Green, a steroid-abusing "Mr. Universe" hopeful, but there was no proof of a crime, leaving police and prosecutors stymied. Tips and sightings poured in as lawmen and volunteers combed the Cascades forest.

When German soldiers invaded Poland in September 1939, it began a six-year journey for then-ten-year-old Renee Salt and her mother Sala. Until their liberation in 1945, Renee and Sala were imprisoned in ghettos and concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen. The only light in the darkness and brutality for Renee was the unwavering grasp of her mother’s hand in hers–enduring, against all odds. It was this unbreakable bond, along with a few miracles, that kept Renee alive.

Cystic fibrosis was once a mysterious disease that killed infants and children. Now it could be the key to healing millions with genetic diseases of every type - from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to diabetes and sickle cell anemia. Told from the perspectives of the patients, families, physicians, scientists, and philanthropists fighting on the front lines, Breath from Salt is a remarkable story of unlikely scientific and medical firsts, of setbacks and successes, and of people who refused to give up hope....

Charlotte Runcie has always felt pulled to the sea, lured by its soothing, calming qualities but also enlivened and inspired by its salty wildness. When she loses her beloved grandmother and becomes pregnant with her first child, she feels its pull even more intensely. In Salt on Your Tongue Charlotte explores what the sea means to us and particularly what it has meant to women through the ages.

In 1979, Wisconsin native Tim McBride hopped into his Mustang and headed south. He was 21, and his best friend had offered him a job working as a crab fisherman in Chokoloskee Island, a town of fewer than 500 people on Florida's Gulf Coast. Easy of disposition and eager to experience life at its richest, McBride jumped in with both feet. But this wasn't a typical fishing outfit.

Fed up with teenage life in the suburbs, Jaimal Yogis ran off to Hawaii with little more than a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and enough cash for a surfboard. His journey is a coming-of-age saga that takes him from communes to monasteries, from the warm Pacific to the icy New York shore. Equal parts spiritual memoir and surfer's tale, this is a chronicle of finding meditative focus in the barrel of a wave and eternal truth in the great, salty blue.

Andrea Kott thought of herself as “the welfare Jew.” The daughter of a single mother whose depression and drinking pitched them into poverty, her stormy life looked nothing like that of the Jewish kids she knew: It defied every stereotype she associated with being Jewish—having an intact family and material wealth, and becoming a bat mitzvah. Alienated and ashamed, Kott felt ineligible to be Jewish, yet hungered for connection to the tradition and to God. It took a near-fatal accident, her mother’s death, marriage and motherhood, and losing a beloved brother for her to find her Jewish home.

In the heart of Vermont's Green Mountains, Helen Whybrow and her partner are presented with the opportunity to steward a two-hundred-acre conserved farm. Whybrow knows that "belonging more than anything requires participation" and radically intertwines her life with the land. Six months after purchasing Knoll Farm, they unload a flock of Icelandic sheep onto the field and Whybrow becomes a shepherd entering into "nature's constant cycle of life into death into life" and all its unexpected lessons.

As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Anna Salton Eisen's memoir, Pillar of Salt: A Daughter's Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, breaks down the barrier of silence that was intended as a protective shield for her parents and their children. From early childhood, Anna, as a second-hand witness to the Holocaust, felt overwhelmed by the unspoken but ever-present trauma of her parents' past. Her father, born as Lucjan Salzman, survivor of ten different concentration camps, is enveloped in impenetrable grief and his history encased in secrecy.

On the edge of the remote salt flats of Australia, a young woman blows in from nowhere and disturbs the precarious equilibrium of a family farm. The boy is fascinated by her, his mother despises her, and the brutish farmhand wants to possess her. When the woman mysteriously disappears, the only trace of her a bloodied dress, the boy sets out in search of an Indian hawker who may or may not have the answers. As he journeys through the broken landscape, accompanied only by his horse and his dog, the boy becomes aware of another party converging murderously on his destination.

While still a young boy, Robb White built his first boat, hewn from the tin roof of an abandoned chicken coop in the backyard. Today, without any formal training, White constructs some of the most sought-after wooden boats around. In How to Build a Tin Canoe, this Southern raconteur and self-taught expert wooden-boat builder recounts tall tales of a life lived on the water, from his childhood exploring the Gulf of Mexico to growing up - or not really growing up - to share his accrued wisdom with others.

When Cathy McLennan first steps into Townsville's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service as a young graduate she isn't expecting a major murder case to land on her desk. The accused are four teenage boys whose family connections stretch across the water to Palm Island. As she battles to prove herself in the courtroom, Cathy realises that the truth is far more complex than she first thought. She starts to question who are the criminals and who are the victims.

Fewer people have rowed across the Atlantic Ocean than have climbed Mount Everest. Adam Rackley is among them. For s70 days, he and his rowing partner ate, slept, and rowed in a boat seven meters long and two meters wide, in one of the world's most extreme environments. This is his story of adventure, endurance, and self-discovery. They were following in the wake of pioneers.

A young girl cannot understand why she should feel so alone in a house filled with so many. Or why her mother collects people like others collect stamps or teacups. The six-bedroom house is filled with children and elderly adults, noise and confusion. Anything can happen at any moment. Her mother insists that Barbara Ann has everything a child could ever want…but Barbara Ann feels something is missing.

Born in Leeds, West Yorkshire, John showed an early interest newspapers when, aged 11, he wrote the Grimthorpe Street Gazette: a one-page paper detailing the latest goings-on in his street. It was a short-lived enterprise, not least as he only had one copy of it (which he charged neighbours a penny to borrow and read). It was whilst working at the Yorkshire Post that he heard of a new opening at the BBC - a move that was to change his life forever....

Margate is in the grip of a heatwave when David Whitehouse stumbles across the mysterious story of a local woman who lived on the ground floor of Saltwater Mansions, a block of flats not far from the sea. On paper, Caroline Lane was unremarkable. She paid her mortgage every month. She always paid her bills. But nobody had seen or heard from her for 13 years, and no one had ever come looking. She had disappeared completely.

For 25 years, Dr. Pietro Bartolo has run the lone medical clinic on the Italian island of Lampedusa. In that time he has rescued, welcomed, and cared for many of the hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants from the Middle East and Africa who have washed up on the island's shores. In this inspiring account of his life and work, Bartolo shares his quiet dignity, unshakable moral center, and inspirational message - "We can't and we won't be governed by our fears."

In Stuffing Cotton, Mary Christine Strobel gives an account of surviving a traumatic boat accident only to find herself less than a year later struggling with her faith when her world was shattered and turned upside down for decades by the most horrific disease you have never heard of, recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa. Its destructiveness and cruelty knocked her down time and time again but she refused to accept defeat and fought to save the lives of her children.