Saltburn by Drew Gummerson - Out Now! Link to buy plus a review

I'm very pleased to announce that Saltburn, by our very own Drew Gummerson is out now and available to buy here:

https://haywoodbooks.com/saltburn

May the residents of the real Saltburn-by-the-Sea and neighbouring towns forgive my mermaids, my nuclear power stations, my foetus museums and so on and so on. They were written with love.

Welcome to Saltburn, an extraordinary town on the English coast with sweeping poverty and nuclear fallout, where young lovers, radioactive and lusty, fall in love, and sea creatures work at the local penny arcade. 

In a series of interconnected short stories a young orphan is taken in by an alchemist, and falls in love with a mermaid. The son of a glove manufacturer is sent to Paris on business, where he falls for a deep-sea diver. One schoolboy bites another, gains psychic abilities and realises they will one day be in love. A rock salesman exposes a cover-up by big business and frees kidnapped women.

In startling prose that could have been concocted by a hallucinating Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski, Saltburn is a town – and a book – like no other.

If that hasn't convinced you to buy, here's a review by airyfairy:

Review: SALTBURN by Drew Gummerson

“For,” asks the narrator near the end of Drew Gummerson’s Saltburn, “what is real and what is not?”

Which seems a perfectly reasonable question in a world where a mermaid runs an amusement arcade, neither an aquarium nor a nuclear power station are what they seem (or are they?), and quite a number of people earn their living in ways which would not please the prowling New Puritans.

Saltburn is a rollicking, rambunctious collection of linked stories whose characters weave in and out of each other’s fates. There is magic on every page, but this is not the magic of wand or spell. It’s vibrant, earthy, human magic, the enchantment of desire in all its forms, aspiration, and glorious absurdity. And all of it rings true.

The author has a personal connection with the real-life Saltburn-by-the-Sea. I’ve never been there, but the book’s Saltburn is instantly recognisable. It’s a place where people are fighting the odds, fighting to be different in a world that demands uniformity, fighting for the right to just be who they want to be, with whoever they want to be with. They’re fighting exploitation, degradation and repression, and the fight is funny, lascivious, fantastical, and at times desperately sad. The reader is rooting for them all the way.

Saltburn is every ‘left behind’ place in the world. 

The book is a brilliantly sharp satire on How We Are Now, but also a heartfelt exploration of the conflicting demands of family and the bonds that anchor us, however tenuously, to places and people. It captures the way people are never just one thing; sexuality and gender are fluid, as are people’s jobs and living spaces, and the very nature of the place itself. All of the protagonists are looking for an escape, and all of them find that, eventually, escape is not defined by geographical distance. 

Above all, these characters are looking for acceptance, warmth, safety. They’re looking for love. Their searches, and the outcomes, are beautiful and poignant. And just bloody hilarious as well.

I don’t think I’ll ever again be able to look at an aquarium, a pit pony, or indeed a jam jar, in the quite the same way as before. I may decide to decamp to Paris in search of Man Ray. I’ve gone right off sardines. And bespoke gloves. But it’s been worth it to be part of this wonderful journey, in the company of these amazing characters. Congratulations to Drew Gummerson on a fantastic (in all senses of the word) piece of writing that is, indeed, completely real.