Overview

In the last great age of sail, a young Norwegian named Olav Hestby left the island of his birth to find out what kind of man the sea would make of him. Norway, 1875. Eighteen years old and ship's cook on a Stavanger brig, Olav learns the trade in the cramped intimacy of the forecastle - under captains who starve their crews, beside men who drown when the rigging fails, and in the held looks of Haakon Berg, a Hogganvik boatswain whose presence he has no word for and no place to put. Home for one bright summer between voyages, he meets Olava on a Sunday at Landa. The summer turns into letters. By the time he ships out again on a twenty-month voyage to Archangel and across the Atlantic, he is carrying a letter to Olava he means to answer, and a silence from a man at a foremast in Stavanger he cannot - two knowledges he cannot yet name: what a woman is teaching him about love, and what a Hogganvik boatswain at a Bristol Friday afternoon will teach him about desire. Salt and Silence is the first book of the Finnoybu trilogy - a queer literary romance built on a real sailor's memoir, told in the weather-roughened register of Jon Fosse and the Icelandic sagas, where what is unsaid carries the weight of the sea. For readers of The Song of Achilles, Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You, and Colm Tóibín's The Master. He came home, in time. He was never again the boy who had sailed. These are the watches he kept.

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