Slip of a Fish

by Amy Arnold

Overview

Ash collects words, climbs trees and swims in a deserted lake with her beloved seven-year-old, Charlie. Bemused by everyday life, she has a rich and singular interior world. Over the course of a relentlessly hot summer, Charlie begins to pull away, and in a desperate attempt to reconnect with her daughter Ash does something unforgivable. As the gulf between them grows, Ash’s life begins to slip out of her grasp.

Winner of the 2018 Northern Book Prize, Slip of a Fish is a joyously artful and quietly devastating portrait of motherhood, loss and love, in all its kaleidoscopic complexity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781911508526
Publisher:	And Other Stories Publishing
Publication date:	07/02/2019
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Amy Arnold was born in Oxford in 1974. She studied Neuropsychology at Birmingham Universityand has worked in a variety of jobs from packing swede to teaching and lecturing. She lives in Cumbria, and in 2018 was awarded the inaugural Northern Book Prize for her debut novel, Slip of a Fish. 

Editorial Reviews

07/29/2019

Arnold’s debut is a lyrical but long-winded portrayal of a woman reckoning with the disappointments of her life. Ash passes her days swimming at a deserted lake with her seven-year-old daughter, Charlie. When she senses Charlie grow distant as she gets older, Ash commits an unforgivable act while trying to reconnect. This sets in motion the crumbling of Ash’s emotional world, revealing memories of an affair with her yoga instructor, a capricious bisexual woman, and a complicated relationship with her father. Ash slips into a depression that confines her to bed, forcing her husband into the arms of a family friend who comes by to care for Charlie. The narrator’s idiosyncratic, troubled personality is expressed through her obsessive interest in sounds and words. During her first date with her husband, she tells him that she collects words, stating that “finding the right word is like finding a pebble on a whole beach of pebbles.” Arnold uses language like a set of dominoes, connecting endings of sentences to beginnings with sounds and phrases to create an artful tumble of prose. However, the novel’s high style comes at the price of momentum, and it becomes opaque to the point of being inaccessible. With very little plot, Arnold’s novel asks questions of profound moral consequence that get lost in the fogginess of its narrator. (July)

Publishers Weekly

A fearless test of empathy, a tender sounding of a mind long since overgrown, and a disturbingly sensual work with a prose that skitters, sinks, hooks, pulls, resists, and flips high in gorgeous blinding flashes, Slip of a Fish heralds the arrival of a stunning new voice in English fiction.”
Northern Book Prize judges praise

“A rich, linguistically dextrous portrait of how our inner and outer worlds collide. Slip of a Fish is a startling and inventive debut.”
Helen Mort

''How many writers really attend to the quality of sentences when they make their fiction? To the heft and jiggle of words on a line? To the texture of phrasing, the fillip of some unexpected syntax or the steady rounds of sound? Not many. But here's one who does." Kirsty Gunn

‘Arnold’s impressive debut is strange and dexterous.. [she] has an ability to capture on the page a complex, obsessive mind without veering into pretention or convolution.’White Review

‘[an] absorbing' debut…an impressive portrait of motherhood, loss and fragility.'Irish Times

‘…few novels achieve the delicate shimmer Arnold's poetic prose evokes in the mind – a cool-warm, unsettling and very beautiful new voice.’The Skinny

‘A fascinating portrait of motherhood, tackling themes of identity and love and loss, but makes no grand assumptions or assertions… a beautifully written novel, almost lyric in its cadence.’Northern Soul

‘With the coiled compactness and intensity of a short story, Slip of a Fish is a strange and original novel.’ - Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher