Salvage | Granta

  • Published: 06/07/2009
  • ISBN: 9781847081087
  • 129x20mm
  • 224 pages

Salvage

Gee Williams

Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are the ones we most want to hear. On the brink of scandal, five characters bound by marriage, friendship and lust attempt to rescue what is most important to them. Through their interwoven narratives, Gee Williams deftly explores the dangers of our personal fictions in a dark, compelling mystery that begins on a stretch of the desolate Welsh coast, when Elly Kent discovers a ring – with a finger still attached – washed up on a beach. Written in the brilliantly vivid vernacular of everyday lives, Salvage is a taut, engrossing study of betrayal, self-justification and the consequences of rewriting the past.

Gee Williams's first novel splits into six disparate parts centred around five different narrators. The ring is largely forgotten while the plot develops around two failing marriages and an adulterous liaison between an aneurysm expert and a Cosmo-reading nurse. Williams supports the sudden shifts in perspective with some well-defined vernacular voices

Michael England, Observer

There is plenty to enjoy in this unguarded debut ... The mystical and mundane lock horns in an unconventional exploration of betrayal and loss

Emma Hagestadt, Independent

An adept and thought-provoking study of what it really means to "write fiction", there is certainly much to be salvaged from this unpredictable first novel

Bookmuch

The Author

Gee Williams is a widely published poet and dramatist as well as a writer of fiction, including two short-story collections Blood Etc and Magic and Other Deceptions. Salvage, her first novel, was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was voted winner of the Pure Gold Fiction Award by Welsh readers. Born in Flintshire, North Wales, Gee Williams now lives in Cheshire with her husband.

More about the author →