Saltwater, paperback/jessica andrews

A Best Book of 2020: Open Letters Review Andrewss writing is transportingly voluptuous, conjuring tastes and smells and sounds like her literary godmother, Edna OBrien .

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 Lucys life has been her mother: comforting and mysterious, ferociously loving, tirelessly devoted, as much a part of Lucy as her own skin.

Her mothers lessons in womanhood shape Lucys appreciation for desire, her sense of duty as a caretaker, her hunger for a better, perhaps reckless life.

At university in glamorous London, Lucys 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 mothers 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.

About author(s): Jessica Andrews writes fiction and poetry.

Her work has been published in The Guardian , The Independent , Elle , AnOther , Somesuch Stories , Shabby Doll House , and Papaya Press, among others.

She teaches literature and creative writing, and is coeditor of The Grapevine , an online arts and literary magazine that aims to give a platform to underrepresented writers.

Saltwater is her first novel.