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From White Review Short Story Prize winner Julia Armfield, a brilliant, provocative debut story collection for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Kelly Link.
In her electrifying debut, Julia Armfield explores women's experiences in contemporary society, mapped through their bodies. As urban dwellers' sleeps become disassociated from them, like Peter Pan's shadow, a city turns insomniac. A teenager entering puberty finds her body transforming in ways very different than her classmates'. As a popular band gathers momentum, the fangirls following their tour turn into something monstrous. After their parents remarry, two step-sisters, one a girl and one a wolf, develop a dangerously close bond. And in an apocalyptic landscape, a pregnant woman begins to realize that the creature in her belly is not what she expected.
Blending elements of horror, science fiction, mythology, and feminism, salt slow is an utterly original collection of short stories that are sure to dazzle and shock, heralding the arrival of a daring new voice.
"[U]nsettling, uncanny, and utterly delightful...Armfield's collection is a dazzling introduction to a talented writer." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Dazzling…Each piece is filled with magic, insight, and a rare level of creativity that mark Armfield as a fresh new voice of magical realism. Artistic and perceptive, Armfield's debut explores the ebbs and flows of human connection in lives touched by the bizarre." - Kirkus Reviews
"Provocative and thrilling…Armfield's collection is exemplary as she pushes the limits of reality into beautifully eerie and unsettling worlds. She blends elements of horror, science fiction, mythology, and feminism in a way that is sure to shock and amaze readers of short fiction." - Booklist
"A darkly exciting debut…Wickedly clever prose and a sense of humor that seems to loom up like a character itself, having been lying in wait in a corner all along." - The Guardian (UK)
"Wild and wonderful, packed with mythical transformations that take place in the most ordinary of contemporary settings…Marvelous." - Daily Mail (UK)
"Reading this collection is the only thing you need to do right now. Armfield is an enormous, gut-wrenching talent." - Daisy Johnson, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Everything Under
"salt slow is exemplary. A distinct new gothic, melancholy, powerful, and poised." - China Miéville, author of The City & The City
"These are brilliantly addictive, barbed, illusive stories. Armfield creates a cleverly unsettling, iridescent world that we are all the better for entering." - Irenosen Okojie, author of Speak Gigantular
This information about salt slow was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Julia Armfield is a fiction writer and occasional playwright with a Masters in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. Her work has been published in The White Review, Lighthouse, Analog Magazine, Neon Magazine and The Stockholm Review. She was commended in the Moth Short Story Prize 2017 and won the White Review Short Story Prize with two of the stories in this collection. She lives in London, where she is at work on her debut novel.
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