Jeremy Page

Years after being fathered by a World War II German soldier who abandoned her mother, Lil emerges from a strange and tragic childhood in the Norfolk marshes to give birth to her own son, Pip, who struggles within his isolated and mute world to make sense of their family history and his growing feelings for a neighbor. A first novel. 40,000 first printing.

Salt

'These were the nights when the German bombers growled through the sky, their bellies full with steel and cordite. When the moon was low their dark shapes and still darker shadows came over the coast. On one of those nights it all began for me - war, after all, starts many things, and even though I wasn't born for another twenty-five years, my story began there.' It is May 1945 and as church bells ring out Victory in Europe over the Norfolk saltmarshes, Goose's daughter Lil is born. But as Lil enters Goose's world, her father leaves it, in a makeshift boat bound - or so the story goes - for Germany, his home. Forty years later it is Lil's son, Pip, who begins to make sense of his family's fragmented history. Who was his grandfather, who fell from the sky into Goose's life and then disappeared as suddenly as he came? What was the truth of his mother, Lil, who lived and lost her way between the creeks and the samphire? And what does it all mean for Pip?

Il collezionista delle piccole cose

A family saga that explores the relationship between people and the landscape in which they live, Jeremy Page's atmospheric and lyrical debut novel is revelatory in its use of language and is the work of a significant new writer. Salt tells of a German airman who falls from the sky in 1945 and lands in the middle of a salt marsh in England. Goose, a local woman, digs him up and brings him home. After staying for just nine months, he vanishes in a makeshift boat, leaving Goose behind with a newborn daughter, Lil. Taught to read the clouds by her mother, Lil's childhood is curious and strange, but when she becomes the object of two brothers' desire, her life takes a tragic turn. Fifteen years later, it is Lil's son, Pip, who attempts to make sense of his family's intriguing history. Beguiled by the lovely Elsie who lives nearby, Pip grows up in the marsh like generations before him, but will their unfortunate past repeat itself?

Five years after a devastating tragedy that changed his life, Guy travels on a Dutch barge that has become his home and records in his diary the family life he imagines, a voyage transformed by the realities of the North Sea and a relationship with a mother and daughter.

Sea Change

A Journey Across the East of England Searching for the Not Quite Visible

New York To California

Arthur Conan Doyle

Susan Scott

'For me, Watson, life is not so interesting,' says Holmes. 'I loved to read the newspaper, hoping to find some news of an interesting crime for me to investigate or a dangerous criminal for me to catch. Where are all those clever criminals these days?' Then, suddenly, a wild, excited young man runs up the stairs to Holmes' room. He has a story to tell about a strange crime that took place in Norwood. But who is the criminal? And is he dangerous? Life, for Holmes, suddenly starts to get interesting.

The Norwood Mystery

Sherlock Holmes

I felt the worlds of ocean and ice were meeting in a frontier of rage, as if the Earth had torn in two along this line.This was a place if there ever was a place, where you could disappear. The year is 1845 and young researcher Eliot Saxby is paid to go on an expedition to the Arctic in the hope of finding remains of the by now extinct Great Auk. He joins a regular hunting ship, but the crew and the passengers are not what they seem. Caught in the web of relationships on board, Eliot struggles to understand the motivations of the sociopathic, embroidery-loving Captain Sykes, the silent First Mate French, the flamboyant laudanum-addicted Bletchley and, most importantly of all, Bletchley's beautiful but strange 'cousin' Clara. As the ship moves further and further into the wilds of the Arctic sea, Eliot clings to what he believes in, desperate to save Clara but drawn irrevocably back into the past that haunts him. The first historical novel from an author who has been critically acclaimed for his two contemporary novels (Salt and The Wake), The Collector of Lost Things is a compulsive, beautifully writtten read.

Jeremy Page

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