Salt imprint: 113 books

In a world where we present our diverse selves through social media, chatbots and messaging, this dark novel listens in on intimate secrets, desires and adultery. This novel-within-a-novel charts the writing of a story about Richard and Anna, a middle-aged professional couple, who face the...

Variations and fugue on the theme of obsession Vesna Main disturbs our self-image as educated, reasonable and ironic people who read modernist fiction. She disturbs us because we recognise ourselves in her obsessive and bloody-minded characters as they are pushed to the extreme. But they are...

The Herald 2017 Books of the Year 1985, Edinburgh. Thatcher’s policies are biting deep – fat cats and street-kids, lovers, losers and the rest struggle to survive. Hume sets up a business catering for the rich and their ever-growing appetites. But by the new millennium, these appetites...

Christmas 2015: The top 10 debut fiction books, The Independent Maddie and Harry: she’s an estate agent, he’s a teacher. They’ll say they live in the Black Country. They’ll say how they met Jonathan Cotard, explain how they later argued, had a car accident, thought they’d killed someone....

Esther is a pregnant amputee, estranged from her father who caused the accident in which she lost her leg. She and her husband, Dan, are journeying by car to their new home, an abandoned station called Rosghill in the Scottish Highlands. Spanning the course of a week, Bee Lewis’s gothic fantasia...

Shortlisted for The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2012 In the house where Marie lives, the cutlery is running wild … Madness and fairy story creep hand in hand in this darkly comic tale. At the top of a narrow driveway there is a shambling Victorian house full of dust and...

This novel is a psychological thriller as well as a compelling crime read. The discovery of the skeleton of a young woman by workmen causes Detective Inspector Tim Yates to reopen the gruesome case of Dorothy Atkins, a woman who was imprisoned for murdering her mother-in-law, Doris Atkins, more than...

Guy Maichment, a landscape gardener, pays a late-night visit to his aunt, Dame Claudia McRae, the well-known veteran archaeologist who lives in an isolated cottage near Helpston, and sees that her front door is wide open. When he enters the house he discovers that his aunt has vanished, leaving no...

Lydia, a woman in her early thirties, lives in London. She lacks a purpose and loses herself in a string of affairs. When she meets Rabia, a convert to Islam, the Moslem rituals and the Arabic language offer her a new beginning. Lydia becomes Kauthar. She falls in love with Rafiq, an Iraqi-born doctor,...

In an idyllic village in south-west France, a web of lives interconnect, ready to unravel at the first touch. Alex is running from a teenage love-affair that went badly wrong at home in England. Julien, the retired village schoolmaster, is struggling with loneliness and insomnia. Pete has everything...

Meike Ziervogel’s new novel celebrates how humanity can thrive against all odds. Set at the end of the Second World War when eleven million Germans fled from east to west, The Photographer explores love and survival in a time of mass migration. Pomerania, 1933: Trude falls in love...

Storm Warning is the latest collection from award-winning writer Vanessa Gebbie, described as ‘prodigiously gifted’ by novelist Maggie Gee. It explores the echoes of human conflict in a series of powerful stories inspired by life with the author’s own father, who fought and was decorated in...

Harold Absalon, the Mayor’s Transport Advisor, has gone missing. Down-at-heel detective Marguerite is trying to find him. Aware that his every action is being monitored by those reading the novel, Marguerite’s mind and world is at constant risk of disintegration. Disturbed by attempts to understand...

The Giddy Career of Mr Gadd (deceased) explores the painful themes of having to grieve for someone who is not yet dead, and trying to find one’s identity through an absent father. Winifred Rigby follows a Zen‑like path of serenity and detachment, whilst leaving havoc in her wake. When Fred,...