"Living is hard emotional work until you try dying. Alongside the rage many terminally ill people feel against the dying of the light, there are the memories that return to flagellate the conscience: the failures of kindness, the misjudged words that can't be unsaid, the feelings left catastrophically unexpressed. Crimes of the heart and sometimes, worse. The malaise of regret and the yearning for absolution vibrate through Andrew Michael Hurley's latest work of fiction,"
"Saltwash is not so much a town as a state of mind: one that the novel's septuagenarian protagonist, Tom Shift, will be forced to reckon with during the course of his brief but soul-shaking visit. He arrives in the pounding rain for a meeting proposed by Oliver, the mercurial, enigmatic penpal brokered for him by the clinic where he goes for therapy."
A septuagenarian named Tom Shift visits the semi-abandoned coastal resort of Saltwash during a brief but soul-shaking stay. The town's estuary has receded into a delta of dark streams and vast sandbanks, and its tattered streets show neglect so rife as to seem wilful. Tom attends an annual gathering at the crumbling Castle Hotel after answering letters from Oliver, an enigmatic penpal arranged by a therapy clinic. Oliver's correspondence brims with literary allusions to mortality while avoiding the fact that both men are dying. Regret and the power of place steer events toward something darker than cosy crime.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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