Dark, Salt, Clear: The Life of a Fishing Town

by Lamorna Ash

Overview

From an adventurous and discerning new voice reminiscent of Robert Macfarlane, a captivating portrait of a community eking out its living in a coastal landscape as stark and storied as it is beautiful.

Before arriving in Newlyn, a Cornish fishing village at the end of the railway line, Lamorna Ash was told that no fisherman would want a girl joining an expedition. Weeks later, the only female on board a trawler called the Filadelfia, she is heading out to sea with the dome of the sky above and the black waves below.

Newlyn is a town of dramatic cliffs, crashing tides, and hardcore career fishermen-complex and difficult heroes who slowly open up to Ash about their lives and frustrations, first in the condensed space of the boat, and then in the rough pubs ashore. Determined to know the community on its own terms, Ash lodges in a spare room by the harbor and lets the village wash over her in all of its clamoring unruliness, thumping machinery, and tangled nets-its history, dialect, and centuries-old industry.

Moving between Ash's surprising, transformational journey aboard the Filadelfia and her astute observations of Newlyn's landscape and people, Dark, Salt, Clear is an assured work of indelible characters and a multilayered travelogue through a landscape both lovely and merciless. Ash's adventurous glint, her delicate observations, and her willingness to get under the skin of a place call to mind the work of Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and Robert Macfarlane. This is an evocative journey and a fiercely auspicious debut.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635576153
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	487,797
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Lamorna Ash is an education worker and a freelance writer for the Times Literary Supplement and TANK magazine. She has a degree in English from Oxford and a master's in social and cultural anthropology from the University College London. She has written numerous plays that have toured Edinburgh, Oxford, and London. She can gut most kinds of fish, quite slowly. Dark, Salt, Clear is her first book. She lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/04/2020

Playwright Ash turns a curious and empathetic eye on the small fishing village of Newlyn in Cornwall, England, weaving history, myth, and memoir into a gripping and affecting debut. Introducing locals both down-to-earth, such as Roger, a grieving retired geologist, and eccentric, such as self-styled “Duchess of Newlyn” Pat, Ash succeeds in bringing the town vividly to life. While Ash explains her connection to the area—her mother grew up nearby and named her for local landmark Lamorna Cove—she shows how she gained a new understanding of it through firsthand experience with the fishing industry that provides Newlyn’s lifeblood. Her activities include observing fish graders rate a catch for auction, riding along on crab-fishing dayboats, and taking a weeklong voyage on a trawler, at the end of which she at last feels like a member of the community. Writing that “the consumer can know nothing of the pranks, the storms and the struggles that their weekly fish supper has been privy to,” Ash leaves readers with a lasting impression of the toil, elation, and sadness faced by her subjects. Ash’s remarkably empathetic take on a small town and its outsized contribution to the fishing industry is one to savor. Agent: Cathryn Summerhayes, Curtis Brown. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Dark, Salt, Clear is an extraordinary debut, a deeply researched and deeply felt work of narrative nonfiction. It is the kind of book that ziplines readers to a different world. You’ll feel the damp sea air and smell the fish and ale in this vivid, multifaceted portrait of a hardworking, hard-drinking town and its salty residents, intimately connected to one another and to every aspect of its sea-to-market fishing industry. Ms. Ash explores questions about work, life and community and in so doing reflects on her own choices. On top of everything else, this book charts the author’s own passage to maturity as she re-evaluates what matters to her." - Wall Street Journal

“I love this town and I love this book-both are imbued with the unadorned lessons of hard earned lives.” —Mark Kurlansky, New York Times bestselling author of Cod, Salt, and Paper

“A gripping and affecting debut . . . Ash's remarkably empathetic take on a small town and its outsized contribution to the fishing industry is one to savor.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An engaging book debut . . . Ash deftly weaves her own reflections with those of many other writers, including W.G. Sebald, Elizabeth Bishop, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, and Barry Lopez, as she considers the indelible connection of identity to geography. A graceful, lovely homage to people and place.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“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, author of THE ANARCHY

“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 from a brilliant writer.” —Philip Marsden, author of RISING GROUND

“Ash 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. She opens up this traditional fishing town to reveal a close knit community struggling to stay afloat. Dark Salt, Clear is a captivating homage.” —Lara Maiklem, author of MUDLARK

“Like some luminous fish risen from the deep, Dark Salt Clear bewitches with its radiance and intricacy. I can think of few other books in which such conscientious reporting maps onto a genuine love of place and history. Lamorna Ash is a revelation.” —Rebecca Giggs, author of FATHOMS

"Compassionate realism illuminates this account of a working-class seaside village in England. . . Dark, Salt, Clear is above all a meditation on place, class, and generational identity . . . A sense of fierce belonging seems to exude from [Newlyn’s residents] like fog from the sea. It’s a feeling that calls to the author, as well." - Washington Independent Review of Books

From the Publisher

10/30/2020

In the prolog, John Steinbeck is held up as an example of a writer who recognizes the "near impossibility of transforming landscapes and people into writing, but who try anyway." Writer Ash largely succeeds in her debut as she explores the Cornish fishing village of Newlyn and its habitants. In poetic descriptions and authentic dialog that is both deep and humorous, readers are placed squarely in the environment. The nonlinear tale mainly splices the author's eight-day journey aboard a trawler with side lessons in local history, geology, geography, politics, conservation, mental health issues, and more. During her time in Newlyn, Ash recalls various authors and their musings as she makes sense of this world, which draws new dimensions for readers as well. Some people might be discouraged by skipping around the timeline, as it's easy to lose track of who is who—Yet, this natural history memoir still manages to offer candid insight into a historical coastal region. VERDICT An unromantic yet beautiful look at life. Readers who appreciate travel stories full of local flavor, as well as those who have ever wondered how a seafood feast ends up on their plate, will enjoy this one. —Elissa Cooper, Helen Plum Memorial Lib., Lombard, IL

Library Journal

★ 2020-09-08
A Londoner goes to sea.

Making an engaging book debut, Ash offers a gently told memoir recounting several extended visits to Newlyn, a Cornwall fishing village to which she feels “unwittingly bound”: Her mother was born there and named Lamorna for a small local cove. Ash captures the color and rhythms of a close-knit community where life, livelihood, and death center on the sea, and “if there is a case one person believes in, it rapidly becomes a village-wide concern.” Generously welcomed by fishermen and supplied with seasickness pills, she embarked on day-boats and trawlers, sometimes for days at a time. She learned to gut, fillet, and box fish, tasks—such as stabbing a huge stingray in its heart—that sometimes left her repulsed. “My physical connection to those fish,” she admits, “the literal opening of their bodies and directing my attention to the secrets inside of them, engenders a permanent change to the way I view fish when back on land.” For the 20-something Londoner, life at sea seemed to be “a kind of monastic existence: imprisoned and yet free, roaming, but in the most confined space possible.” In evocative detail, she depicts the unique personality of each boat—“the particular wheezing, spluttery cough of each engine”—and each fisherman, some of whom became her confidants; others, drinking buddies. Younger fishermen, especially, expressed their urgent concern with sustainability and worry about humankind’s “potentially devastating impact on the oceans.” Ash deftly weaves her own reflections with those of many other writers, including W.G. Sebald, Elizabeth Bishop, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, and Barry Lopez, as she considers the indelible connection of identity to geography. “Though your body is in the harbour once more,” she notes, after getting back on land, “for a long time your mind is still at sea.”

A graceful, lovely homage to people and place.

Kirkus Reviews