RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Dark, Salt, Clear , melds history, literature and the highly personal into something far more complex and compelling than the \'evocative journey replete with poetry\' of the publisher’s blurb. W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn becomes Ash’s lodestar ... Her direct accounts are wadded between allusions to Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Herman Melville and others, and a mass of detailed local history, mined deeply and purposefully ... Ash’s search for a sense of authenticity and belonging is part of the story-within-a-story that remains unresolved. When the regulars at the pub shout a chorus of welcome, a recalcitrant deckhand gifts her a cloudy lump of amber and the couple with whom she has been lodging hug her goodbye, it feels like another Eden from which, shackled to a different life, she is bound to turn wistfully away.
