Kirjahaku

A sensational tale of obsession and murder from the author of The Wilding. England, 1640s. Jacob Cullen is an educated, vigorous and dauntingly strong manservant in a Royalist household, who has begun to develop a dangerous interest in god-fearing revolutionary pamphlets. He is on the brink of marriage to his virginal sweetheart, but is unsure of his emotional needs, and in possession of a boiling point he reaches all too often. But Jacob is also afraid of being discovered as the murderer of a local boy and, as armed horsemen arrive on the very day of his wedding feast, it prompts a series of impetuous, temper-fuelled bad decisions: Jacob flees, dragging his new wife and one of his brothers with him. He proceeds to wreak havoc on the lives of others but mostly on his own fortunes – as a servant, a husband, a brother, a soldier, and, critically, as friend, co-conspirator and lover of another man disaffected by the lurch from freedom to tyranny now apparent in Cromwell’s New Model Army. To step outside the law, outside the state, outside the established and natural order of things seems to supply the only prospect of happiness… Gripping, unusual, packed with heady ingredients, As Meat Loves Salt plunges you into a world turned upside down by political fervour, inflammatory pamphleteering, social flux, grisly combat, apocalyptically evangelical Christianity, sexual confusion, and murder most foul.

In the seventeenth century, the English Revolution is under way. The nation, seething with religious and political discontent, has erupted into violence and terror. Jacob Cullen and his fellow soldiers dream of rebuilding their lives when the fighting is over. But the shattering events of war will overtake them. A darkly erotic tale of passion and obsession, As Meat Loves Salt is a gripping portrait of England beset by war. It is also a moving portrait of a man on the brink of madness. Hailed as a masterpiece, this is a first novel by a most original new voice in fiction. A gripping portrait of England caught up in the throes of revolution, Maria McCann’s novel "imaginatively re-creates the mentality of a society racked by war and intoxicated by radical new ideas of freedom and chance" (The Times Literary Supplement). "Absorbing and historically meticulous. —The Economist

A novel of secrets and revenge within a seventeenth-century English family. Longlisted for the Orange Prize1672. A generation after the Civil War, Jonathan Dymond, a cider maker, has so far enjoyed a quiet life. But when he discovers a letter from his dying uncle, hinting an inheritance and revenge, he is determined to unravel the mystery in his family. Under the pretence of his cider business, Jonathan visits his newly widowed aunt and there meets her unruly servant girl, Tamar, who soon reveals that she has secrets of her own...

Behind doors is another story. Behind doors you can do what you like. Sophia - rational, demure, and hiding a 'little weakness' - has recently married the charismatic Mr Zedland. But Zedland has secrets of his own and Sophia comes to suspect that her marriage is not what it seems. In cramped rooms in Covent Garden, Betsy-Ann shuffles a pack of cards. A gambler, dealer in second-hand goods, and living with a grave robber, her life could not be more different to Sophia's - but she too discovers that she has been lied to. As both women take steps to discover the truth, their lives come together through a dramatic series of events, taking the reader through the streets of 1760s London: a city wearing a genteel civility on its surface and rife with hypocrisy, oppression and violence lurking underneath.