Salt Publishing strana 2 z 2

In the wake of a deadly storm, past sins return to haunt the living…Eilean Eoin is a tiny scrap of land which is stranded amidst miles of fierce ocean, where the scant population barely cling to a centuries’ old way of life. It is here that Flora McKinnon, an aging islander, is brought news of her youngest child’s death, whilst tensions are riled by the arrival of a new reverend, Thomas Murray. Murray has a mission: to weed out religious dissent and purge the island in the name of progress.When a strange young woman is found washed up on the foreshore, illness and famine start to blight the island, stirring whispers of witchcraft. Despite their differences, Flora and Murray unite in an uneasy attempt to solve the mystery of the girl’s identity, which soon becomes an all-consuming obsession. With their own deep-buried skeletons, will the island''s dark secrets make or break them both?

The Homecoming is Zoë Apostolides’s debut novel. Quietly disturbing, it tells the story of Ellen, a young ghost-writer sent to record the memoirs of an elderly woman living in a remote Northumberland manor. Elver House is dilapidated, its faded beauty fading to ruin.The assignment seems simple enough. Ellen will spend a week conducting interviews at the wild and sprawling estate – far from the quaint country cottage she had imagined – before returning to London to write Miss Carey’s autobiography. She digs deeper into its history, its lore and mystique and its occupant''s increasingly bizarre behaviour. Clearly it isn''t just the past that''s haunting Miss Carey. And in unravelling the tangled threads of the older woman''s story, Ellen too must confront more about herself than she bargained for.Part mystery, part ghost story, this is a story about isolation, memory, spirits and secrets, intergenerational friendship and motherhood.

On Stewkey Blues: ‘In his solid, grounded, entertaining collection of stories, DJ Taylor draws out the mythical qualities of East Anglia’s terrain, urban or rural or somewhere marginal in between.’ —Hilary MantelMost of the people in Poppyland are watching their lives begin to blur at the margins. From small-hours taxi offices, out-of-season holiday estates and flyblown market stalls, they sit observing an environment that seems to be moving steadily out of kilter, struggling to find agency, making compromises with a world that threatens to undermine them, and sometimes – but only sometimes – taking a decisive step that will change their destinies.

Poems within Everything is Present have won The Ledbury Competition, The Wigtown Prize, and were featured in The Forward Book of Poems of the Year.‘As brave, as bravura, a performance as the ill-advised, little-known acts it celebrates, this is both a lament and a defiant affirmation of an individual’s life.’ Phillip Gross, Ledbury Prize‘A stark and timely reminder of how there is always some level of choice when it comes to traditions and symbols, and the significant role this choice has in harming or healing our collective and individual relationships with the past.’ Roseanne Watt, Wigtown PrizeEverything is Present is a mid-life coming of age tale. The back to front narrative is divided into three sections, End, Middle and Beginning. Poems explore the effect of grief and ageing and the ability of these two to alter the past as well as the present. The title comes from a Buddhist meditation referring to the non-linear nature of time as well as its gift.The first section End contains award-winning elegies for a mother who died on a locked-down ward during the pandemic and a grandfather who escaped from Nazi-occupied Lwów (then in Poland, now the Ukraine). There is also a Ledbury-winning poem describing a Jerry Lee Lewis- loving father’s visit to A&E. The second section Middle negotiates the shifting ground of middle age exploring women’s bodies, work, therapy and the consolations of love and spirituality in poems featuring amusement arcades, train derailments and Allen Jones’ controversial women as furniture sculptures. Beginning revisits youthful sex, running away from home and Happy Shopper before embracing middle aged sex and then returning in a (never) ending to the mother.

‘A stunningly evocative, beautifully written gothic novel drawing on myths and fairytales in a devastating depiction of psychological and visceral horrors.’ —Lisa Tuttle, The Guardian‘This debut novel establishes Tierney as a bold new voice in literary horror.’ —Gingernuts of HorrorThe heatwave of 1995. Sixteen years since an infamous tiger-lynx hybrid escaped a small moorland zoo and ate someone. Sixteen years since the animal was euthanised. Sixteen years for the zoo to fall into disrepair.Then sixteen-year-old convalescent Lowdy, and her Mumma, are forced to move to the remote old zoo to care for her dying grandmother, and rumours of the animal stalking the moors resurface. Vengeful locals blame the three women for the predator on the loose. Mumma insists all the cats are dead. Grandma whispers that the ‘tynx’ needs to be fed. Lowdy, still recovering from her own mysterious illness, begins to wonder who she can trust. Can she even trust herself when she wakes up covered in ticks with no recollection of the night befor? s Lowdy searches for the truth – the truth of her childhood, what it means to be a woman, and the truth about the cats – she realises something feral runs in the blood, something she cannot ignore.Much more than simply the wry horror of a young woman’s beastly metamorphosis, The Cat Bride views the eerie liminality of teenaged girls through a pastoral gothic fug of lairy nineties lads, booze and fags.

‘Funny, chilling, intriguing: each tale offers something different from the last, and the overall result is like listening to a perfectly made album.’ —Mark WatsonAn anechoic chamber is a soundproofed room with no echo. The profound silence it produces is disturbing enough. But listen carefully and you’ll hear something worse … In this new collection of uncanny short stories, award-winning author Will Wiles finds sinister creatures and subtle nightmares in mundane modern environments and bureaucracy. A cursed NHS file brings doom to whoever handles it. A memory-foam mattress breaks down the walls of sleep. A marketing executive for a property developer turns to the occult. And horror seeps from the most unexpected places: eBay purchases, boxes of holiday photographs, and the hidden corners of the smart TV menu. While mostly modern in setting, this is a collection steeped in the tradition of the weird tale and the ghost story, and includes homages to the greats of the previous century: a doomed Edwardian antiquarian is drawn into a murderous plot involving a Roman mosaic, and river boatmen uncover eldritch terror in a deserted mining town. You’ll never look at some things the same way again.

Irish Times: Books to Look Out for in 2025This collection of stories, written especially for BBC Radio 4, includes a ten-part sequence: ‘The Circus’, set around Cliftonville Circus, where five roads meet in North Belfast. It’s five minutes from the nationalist Troubles flashpoint of Ardoyne, where Paul grew up. It’s close to Holy Cross Girls’ School, where protests targeting primary school children drew international attention. The Circus is situated in the poorest part of Belfast – it is also the most divided. Each road leads to a different area – a different class – a different religion. The Circus explores where old Belfast clashes with the new around acceptance, change, class and diversity. But this is 2024 and a fresh energy exists.Other stories include ‘Tickles’, a story about a man visiting his mother in a dementia ward where he finds he is the one who had forgotten important things; ‘Cuckoo’, about a man’s collapse and surgery – where he feels something more sinister has happened to him; and ‘Daddy Christmas’, where a gay man writes a letter to the son he never had.

Ken Evans’s collection is structured in three inter-locking and overlapping sequences: Family; Masculinity; and America. Subjects range from the personal sacrifice and meaning of an organ donation; the loss of a child in still-birth; the death of a friend through drink, as well as bigger themes of our constant wars and forebodings of climate collapse. But these poems also experience hope, humour and optimism shining through – and often co-existing with the darker themes, thus poems on the small vagaries and mishaps of our digital lives, of the money-anxieties of car maintenance, or of negotiating airport security with a replacement hip.

New And Selected Poems brings together a quarter of a century of exceptional writing.Julian Stannard started his career as a writer in the Italian port city of Genoa. He has written at length about Liguria and Italy in general. His work has been translated into Italian and he finds his place in a rich Anglo-Ligurian tradition. This gathering of poems from many collections infuses his love of Italy with a clear-eyed view of modern Britain.These are poems which can wrong foot and amaze. His satirical appetite draws on Rabelais, Gogol, Swift, and Lear. Stannard ultimately creates an unmistakable voice – the commonplace is made strange and yet even stranger still.2010 Winner of the International Troubadour Prize 2024 – Awarded the Lerici Shelley Prize

From the secrets of the forest, to the magic of the sea, these nine stories tell of what happens when passion, desire, loneliness and imprisonment lead us on a search for freedom and empowerment - no matter what the cost. A woman makes a deal with gods and goddesses in order to bring a slanderous town down to its knees, a man who has lost everything finds himself in the graveyards of Paris, turning to dark magic to ensure success, an opulent masked ball becomes the stage of spite and revenge, a teenage boy who believes he is in the wrong body calls out to mermaids to enchant him. With strands of classic fairy and folklore weaved through, the unknown - the silent and dark - is explored. Where spirits, deities and witches lurk, but also where the beauty of life and renewal can be found.

Stanly is frustrated. Having set himself up as London's protector, he's finding that the everyday practicalities of superheroism are challenging at best, and downright tedious at worst. So it's almost a relief when an attempt is made on his life and Stanly finds himself rushing headlong into a twisted adventure, with enemies new and old coming out of the woodwork. However, even with his friends and his ever-increasing power behind him, he may have bitten off more than he can chew this time. The monsters are coming ...and nothing will ever be the same!

In Edwardian England, Violet has a fairy tale existence: loving husband, beautiful baby son and luxurious home. She wants for nothing. But soon after the birth of her baby the idyll begins to disintegrate. Violet becomes obsessed by a book of fairy tales her husband has locked away in a safe. Paranoid hallucinations begin to haunt her and she starts to question her sanity. Meanwhile, vulnerable young women are starting to disappear from the nearby asylum. Soon Violet herself is interned in the asylum for treatment only to discover, on coming out, that her husband has hired a nanny while she has been away, the beautiful, enigmatic Clara. The brutality of the asylum is nothing compared to the horrors that now lie in wait.

Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize for new writers A Times Children's Book of the Week A Guardian Top Teen Read of 2015 "Happy birthday, Stanly. We hope you like your present..." Cynical, solitary Stanly Bird is a fairly typical teenager - unless you count the fact that his best friend is a talking beagle named Daryl, and that he gained the powers of flight and telekinesis when he turned sixteen. Unfortunately, his rural Welsh home town is not exactly crying out for its very own superhero. London is calling - but what Stanly finds there is a good deal weirder and more terrifying than anything he could have imagined. Perhaps he should have stayed in Wales ...