A Best Book of 2020: Open Letters Review
Andrews’s writing is transportingly voluptuous, conjuring tastes and smells and sounds like her literary godmother, Edna O'Brien … 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. -Penelope Green, The New York Times Book Review
This luminous (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 Lucy’s 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 Lucy’s appreciation for desire, her sense of duty as a caretaker, her hunger for a better, perhaps reckless life.
At university in glamorous London, Lucy’s 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 mother’s stories to make sense of her place in the world.
In a stunning new voice in British literary fiction (The Independent) that lays bare our raw, dark selves, Jessica Andrews’s 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.
