A Sweet Sting of Salt

Informationen zum Autor Rose Sutherland was born and raised a voracious reader of anything she could get her hands on in rural Nova Scotia, and once even fell off the roof of her house trying to re-enact Anne of Green Gables . She's continued to be entertainingly foolhardy since, graduating theater school in New York City, apprenticing at a pâtisserie in France, and most recently, working in theater in Toronto. She's mildly obsessed with the idea of one day owning a large dog, several chickens, and maybe a goat. A Sweet Sting of Salt is her first novel, and the story is a love letter to the wild beauty of the place she calls home. Klappentext "Once a young woman uncovers a dark secret about her neighbor and his mysterious new wife, she'll have to fight to keep herself -- and the woman she loves -- safe in this stunning reimagining of The Selkie Wife"-- Leseprobe 1 November 1832 The ship was burning. Sorry . . . ? Jean looked up from drying her hands on a worn tea towel, frowning at the non sequitur. Last night, the ship was burning. Ida Mae Eisenor waved toward the window over the table in her kitchen as she sat herself up on the sofa. The moon was full. Everyone says the ghost ship burns in the bay on full-moon nights. Did you see it, out where you are? Oh, sure. Jean closed the lid of her basket, solid and real. Had the captain in for tea, too, don't you know? She rolled her eyes as she spoke, teasing. Jean Langille! Ida leveled her pinky and pointer fingers at Jean, warning off the evil eye. You oughtn't say such things! You'll have the devil at your door. With that, she stood, shook her skirts back into place, and went to poke a finger into her dough, testing to see if it had risen enough to go in the oven. When it was done baking, Ida would run a knife 'round the finished loaf and lift it out, rather than turning over the pan and risk turning a ship over with it. That was the superstition, among the German families. The British had brought the Germans to the South Shore, fresh out of people of their own to settle the colony with, or at least any willing to pay for the dubious privilege of a perilous trip in exchange for hard work and an uncertain reward. England had gone recruiting and come up with a few boatloads of Germans, some French like Jean's father's people, and even a handful of reluctant Swiss. Farmers all, they were set down on a land so full of trees and rocks that they were forced into working the seas and the forests instead. Only their mingled superstitions took root, and those had twined around one another until it was hard to say where one story left off and the next began, which were fanciful and which were true. If something followed you through the wood to the stream, you didn't know whose boat it had got off of, nor did you care, and you didn't slow your steps to ask if it was something older still, one of the things the Natives talked more around than about. The Young Teazer might not have made port on its final voyage, but it had found firm anchor among all the other tales in the twenty years since its demise, said to round the point tipped in silver flame on clear, full-moon nights, only to vanish as sirens and selkies and mermaids did. It was a pretty and romantic notion, the ghost ship, and harmlessas so many pretty, romantic notions were not. As the village midwife, Jean had seen where romantic notions got you and considered the newly minted Mrs. Eisenor fairly solid evidence of it. A handsome enough lass of seventeen, Ida Mae Mosher had first found herself caught in the family wayand then found herself married within days of the thing being known. The young man involved, Richie, was a pig farmer's son with a good head of hair and a ready laugh, who'd kissed her breathless after a dance at the hall. The pair of them had certainly had a romantic...

Auteur

Rose Sutherland was born and raised a voracious reader of anything she could get her hands on in rural Nova Scotia, and once even fell off the roof of her house trying to re-enact Anne of Green Gables. She’s continued to be entertainingly foolhardy since, graduating theater school in New York City, apprenticing at a pâtisserie in France, and most recently, working in theater in Toronto. She’s mildly obsessed with the idea of one day owning a large dog, several chickens, and maybe a goat. A Sweet Sting of Salt is her first novel, and the story is a love letter to the wild beauty of the place she calls home.

Texte du rabat

Once a young woman uncovers a dark secret about her neighbor and his mysterious new wife, she’ll have to fight to keep herself—and the woman she loves—safe in this stunning queer reimagining of the classic folktale “The Selkie Wife.”

“Laced with a slow-building sense of Gothic dread, Sutherland’s captivating debut is an intensely beautiful experience you won’t soon forget.”—Paulette Kennedy, author of The Witch of Tin Mountain

When a sharp cry wakes Jean in the middle of the night during a terrible tempest, she’s convinced it must have been a dream. But when the cry comes again, Jean ventures outside and is shocked by what she discovers—a young woman in labor, drenched to the bone in the bitter cold and able to speak barely a word of English.

Although Jean is the only midwife for miles around, she’s at a loss for who this woman is or where she’s from; Jean can only assume that she must be the new wife of the neighbor up the road, Tobias. And when Tobias does indeed arrive at her cabin in search of his wife, Muirin, Jean’s questions continue to multiply. Why has he kept his wife’s pregnancy a secret? And why does Muirin’s open demeanor change completely the moment she’s in his presence?

Though Jean learned long ago that she should stay out of other people’s business, her growing concern—and growing feelings—for Muirin mean that she can’t simply set her worries aside. But when the answers she finds are more harrowing than she ever could have imagined, she fears she may have endangered herself, Muirin, and the baby. Will she be able to put things right and save the woman she loves before it’s too late, or will someone have to pay for Jean’s actions with their life?