Kirjahaku

'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. Several hours later they'd return again, wearily, lighter in weight, fewer in number, dropping the occasional bomb on the forgotten land of creeks and channels beneath them. 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, whose heritage of flood, fireworks, fish and clouds, has left him ill-prepared for life beyond the marshes?

A field, a perfect morning, a family destroyed in a single moment. Every night, before he cuts the engine and lets the boat drift, Guy writes the diary of the man he should have been - of a husband with his wife and their young daughter; of a new family that may not have been perfect but who were, at least, together. And every morning, as he's rocked in his berth by the waves all around, he wakes to the memory of that fateful day and the knowledge that things can never be the same. Embarking on a moving and eventful journey from the calm estuaries of East Anglia to the southern states of America and the storm-filled waters of the North Sea, Guy meets Marta and her daughter Rhona, who are on a life-affirming journey of their own . . .

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?

"A moving portrait of a father who, unable to save what he most loved, tried to save what could have been." -The Atlanta Journal- Constitution From the acclaimed author of Salt comes this exquisitely written and deeply haunting novel of love and family. When a terrible tragedy changes his family forever, Guy-alone and searching for answers-embarks in his old barge on the stormy waters of the North Sea, writing in his diary about the man he might have been and the family he should have had. His voyage unfolds in unexpected ways, and when he meets two women at sea on a similar quest, Guy realizes that it just might be possible to begin his life again.

The first historical novel from a critically acclaimed writer, in which the characters are fuelled by obsession, passion and ghosts, The Collector of Lost Things is an extraordinarily compulsive read.

Novelist and traveller Jeremy Page takes a walk through the Lincolnshire fens and along the Norfolk coast, in search of something within himself, and the landscape, which remains not quite visible.

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 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 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.