A captivating, lyrical and deeply discerning portrait of life in the Cornish town of Newlyn, the largest working fishing port in Britain, from a brilliant new writer
Lamorna Ash is a freelance writer and journalist. She has a degree in English from Oxford and a masters in Social and Cultural Anthropology from UCL. She can gut most kinds of fish, quite slowly. Dark, Salt, Clear is her first book.
Ash gets to the salty heart of why [commercial fishing] still
matters, not just to the communities in Cornwall it sustains, but
for the richness and cultural heritage it represents ... Beyond the
beauty of her prose, Ash’s great strength lies in her ability to
capture a sense of place
*Sunday Times*
Part coming-of-age memoir, part anthropological study, Dark, Salt,
Clear glistens with deftly told snippets and character-rich stories
… Cornwall’s harbourside cottages and ragged cliffs may look
picturesque, but they hide an unsettling “anger and insularity”,
she argues. With graceful lyricism and endearing humility, Ash
gives this rage both voice and face
*Financial Times*
Terrific ... A hugely moving but unsentimental account of not only
today’s fishermen but also a salty, grafting, real-life England too
rarely depicted in literature ... It is well-timed, feels rather
important, and has excellent tips on the filleting of fish. What
more could you want?
*Mail on Sunday*
Lamorna Ash conjures a remarkable sense of place, her book deftly
woven with a profound empathy for the people she encounters, as
well as great literature, past and present. I loved this book
*Sophy Roberts, author of 'The Lost Pianos of Siberia'*
One of Spring’s most hotly anticipated titles
*Observer*
A beautiful account of immersion in an alien world – the tightly
bound fishing community of Newlyn ... Spending weeks with fishermen
on small fishing boats, and amid their equally turbulent shore
life, Ash offers a sharp and poignant portrait of men living an
intense and peripheral existence
*Guardian*
[An] outstanding travel writing debut … If you love Cornwall for
its beaches and photogenic fishing villages, you should read this
captivating, true-to-life portrait of a place that, while angry and
insular at times, is also fiercely proud and community-minded …
Newlyn is a place with much to teach us in these times
*Daily Express*
Beautifully written … [Ash is] an empathetic writer who sees poetry
in the everyday … If you read this thoughtful and observant
chronicle, you’ll never look at Cornwall in the same way again
*Daily Mail*
Lamorna Ash is a beautiful prose stylist – precise, perceptive,
humane and sensitive – who somehow manages to write in a way that
is both earthy and poetic. Her debut book – full of fish and blood
and salt and oilskins – marks the birth of a new star of
non-fiction
*William Dalrymple*
I love this town and I love this book – both are imbued with the
unadorned lessons of hard earned lives
*Mark Kurlansky*
With the heart of a novelist and the clarity of an ethnographer,
Lamorna Ash reveals the Cornish fishing community of Newlyn in all
its tension and hardship and wild joy. Dark, Salt, Clear is a book
of deep immersion and a stunning debut
*Philip Marsden*
Lamorna Ash evokes the vigour and complexity of the country’s
westernmost fishing port with a love only a granite heart could
resist. As Cornwall’s fishing and farming communities hold their
breath to see whether leaving the EU will save or savage them,
Dark, Salt, Clear arrives at the perfect time and should be
cherished by natives, incomers and emmets alike
*Patrick Gale*
Lamorna writes with a maturity and wisdom that betrays her years
and which took me to the very heart of Newlyn while questioning my
sense of belonging ... Dark Salt, Clear is a captivating homage to
Newlyn and its people
*Lara Maiklem*
Lamorna Ash’s beautiful debut is a seductive, vivid reading
experience. A portrait of the life and unique character of a
community, it is also an exploration of the spaces around a person,
that make up the person – a young woman’s search for her own
identity and her self. You’ll love her characters, because they’ve
been written with love, and that makes them live on the page
*Barney Norris*
Lamorna Ash's captivating debut charts her trawler trip with
Cornish fishermen, and the lessons she learned about a dying
tradition and what it takes to live at sea
*Vogue*
[Ash] tells the riveting tale of eight days spent at sea on a
trawler with a crew of fishermen. Battling homesickness and
seasickness, she sets herself to this toughest and most perilous of
trades, learning to haul, gut and pack fish. It’s a portrait of a
place that, while sometimes insular, is also community-minded
*Daily Mirror*
All should make room in their luggage for this book, an
illuminating depiction of the realities of life in the Cornish
fishing port of Newlyn
*Financial Times*
[A] wonderful debut ... The guts of the book is an unsentimental
account of life on a trawler that feels particularly timely with
fishing rights rarely out of the news
*Mail on Sunday*
Revealing the tension, grit and camaraderie of a community defined
by the sea, she learns to gut fish and weather storms, confronting
the looming shadow of globalisation with a raw, poetic
sensitivity
*Coast*
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