Saltwater

A Best Book of 2020: Open Letters Review

"AndrewsΓÇÖs writing is transportingly voluptuous, conjuring tastes and smells and sounds like her literary godmother, Edna OΓÇÖBrien . . . What makes her novel sing is its universal themes: how a young woman tries to make sense of her world, and how she grows up."
ΓÇôPenelope Green, The New York Times Book Review

This ΓÇ£luminousΓÇ¥ (The Observer) feminist coming-of-age novel captures in sensuous, blistering prose the richness and imperfection of the bond between a daughter and her mother

It begins with our bodies . . . Safe together in the violet dark and yet already there are spaces beginning to open between us.

From that first immaculate, fluid connection, through the ups and downs of a working-class childhood in northern England, the one constant in LucyΓÇÖs life has been her mother: comforting and mysterious, ferociously loving, tirelessly devoted, as much a part of Lucy as her own skin. Her mother''s lessons in womanhood shape LucyΓÇÖs appreciation for desire, her sense of duty as a caretaker, her hunger for a better, perhaps reckless life.

At university in glamorous London, LucyΓÇÖs background sets her apart. And then she is finished, graduated, adrift. She escapes to a tiny house in Donegal left empty by her grandfather, a place where her mother once found happiness. There she will take a lover, live inside art and the past, and track back through her memories and her motherΓÇÖs stories to make sense of her place in the world.

In ΓÇ£a stunning new voice in British literary fictionΓÇ¥ (The Independent) that lays bare our raw, dark selves, Jessica AndrewsΓÇÖs debut honors the richness and imperfection of the bond between a daughter and her mother. Intricately woven in lyrical vignettes, Saltwater is a novel of becoming-- a woman, an artist-- and of finding a way forward by looking back.