Review
A controlled and gifted stylist, Williams is inventive and inspiring in her craft. Salvage masquerades as a murder mystery while exploring the less sunlit aspects of the Welsh shoreline and of the human soul. Dominant and daring in her prose, Williams relishes the act of writing and constructs five distinct characters with genres particular to each, including a wonderful Cosmo send-up for the gorgeous gold-digging nurse as well as a provocative intervention of the author herself. Salvage constantly shifts the literary goalposts from crime to romance to a metafictional crisis while never losing the immediacy of the characters or the suspense of the crime. --Prof Colin Nicholson, JTB Prize Judge
Offbeat, subtle, fresh. --Kate Long
Riveting... a novel that defies genre and crosses boundaries to extraordinary effect... an author utterly in control of her material... nothing superfluous... nothing merely clever. --gwales
Offbeat, subtle, fresh. --Kate Long
Riveting... a novel that defies genre and crosses boundaries to extraordinary effect... an author utterly in control of her material... nothing superfluous... nothing merely clever. --gwales
Offbeat, subtle, haunting, fresh
Kate Long
Product Description
Shortlisted for 2007 JTB Memorial Prize, winner of Estyn Allan Pure Gold Award, longlisted Waverton Good Read Award. A short break in a shoreline cottage is an ideal place to struggle with your demons. For Elly and Martin it is the chance to forget their hasty exit from Paradise following classroom scandal. But Elly makes a life-changing find on the tideline. It is a huge pink diamond ring, finger bones still attached. Scroll back a few months and at Martin's place of work - a Chester hospital - we meet new nurse Hayley. Twenty-five; gorgeous (even by her own admission); she is a player, and totally turned off by the ward surgeon, Richard Congreve. Until, that is, she catches a whiff of something expensive in his Jag and is ensnared by a gift so desirable it may prove fatal. As we begin to question who the ring and its finger really belong to, the cottage collects the secrets of those friends and strangers who have stayed there. Why has Ellly such power over them all? Ranging between Wales, the north of England and Goa, this is a novel about possession, betrayal, violence - and just how much we can afford to lose.
From the Publisher
Ranging between Wales, the north of England and Goa, this is a
novel about possesion, betrayal, violence - and just how much we can afford
to lose.
novel about possesion, betrayal, violence - and just how much we can afford
to lose.
About the Author
Gee Williams is a poet and the prize-winning author of two short story collections. Numerous full-length plays and short fiction pieces of hers have been broadcast on BBC radio. This is her first novel.
