Salt Lick

Food production has moved overseas. The countryside is empty and once again wild. The rural economy has collapsed and people have no choice but to move to the cities. The population drifts away, towns and villages are abandoned. It isn’t dystopian, but it is further down the wrong road.

Jesse is eight. His family, moved on once by the sea flooding their coastal home, try to cling to their livelihoods in a small village. Soon, there is no work left; the family make the same necessary choice as so many others and a new life begins in London.

Decades pass. Isolde, now in her thirties, grew up in a children’s home that made her tough, resilient and uncertain. Her life is stalled, happiness elusive. She decides, finally, to learn about herself, and the formative event in early childhood - the death of her mother in a terrorist attack. She begins by visiting her mother’s killer in prison, to discover why it was that Stella died, crushing the body of her small daughter as she bled out on a city street so many years before.

In the prison, Isolde discovers that her mother’s death wasn’t as grimly straightforward as she had believed. To learn more, she decides she must head out of the city to find a group of off-grid idealists, New Agrarians living self-sufficiently on a farm somewhere in the Suffolk countryside. She leaves London on foot, walking the abandoned A12, sheltering in houses with buddleias growing through broken windows, faded carpets shot with bindweed, foxes in the dining rooms.

She meets Lee, a young runaway from one of the White Towns, white nationalist settlements that scatter the country like a dangerous rash. Isolde takes Lee under her wing and together they travel on to find the farm. Lee, who wears a ribbon around his neck to hide the tattoo of his provenance, is sheltered by the group from the threat of his family, bent on taking him back. Isolde’s past, the looping connection between her and Jesse, and the possibility of a different future is revealed.

The book has a chorus, the dreamy herd voice of feral cows, who are impatient with humans for their cruelty and lack of ability to find contentment, but they watch over Jesse, Isolde and Lee with benevolent care, understanding their lives as part of a bigger story that ravels and unravels endlessly over time.

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