The electrifying debut from the White Review Prize winner
Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award
'Thrilling . . . A writer whose next move you wouldn't want to miss.' Observer
'Wickedly clever prose and a sense of humour that seems to loom up like a character in itself' M JOHN HARRISON, Guardian
In her brilliantly inventive and haunting debut collection of stories, Julia Armfield explores bodies and the bodily, mapping the skin and bones of her characters through their experiences of isolation, obsession, love and revenge.
Teenagers develop ungodly appetites, a city becomes insomniac overnight, and bodies are diligently picked apart to make up better ones. The mundane worlds of schools and sleepy sea-side towns are invaded and transformed, creating a landscape which is constantly shifting to hold on to its inhabitants. Blurring the mythic and the gothic with the everyday, Salt Slow considers characters in motion – turning away, turning back or simply turning into something new entirely.
Winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018, Armfield is a writer of sharp, lyrical prose and tilting dark humour – Salt Slow marks the arrival of an ambitious and singular new voice.
'Salt Slow is exemplary. A distinct new gothic, melancholy, powerful and poised.' China Miéville, author of The City & The City
'Armfield is an enormous, gut-wrenching talent.' Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under
'Truly dazzling . . . so subtle, intelligent and imaginative.' Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman Julia Armfield lives and works in London. She is a fiction writer and occasional playwright with a Masters in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. Her work has been published in Lighthouse, Analog Magazine, Neon Magazine and Salt's Best British Short Stories 2019. She was commended in the Moth Short Story Prize 2017, longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Prize 2018 and is the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018. Salt Slow is the electrifying debut collection of short stories about the monstrous in all of us, from a prize-winning new British talent.
