Authortrek
| Tell Me Everything | Something Beginning With | Leading The Dance | Messages | Your Messages |
 |
 |
 |
 |
TELL ME EVERYTHING
There are moments when you really can stop time. Make a decision to go one way, and not the other. There's just a sense, a prickle on the skin, that tells you you're at the crossroads. But it's only when you're too far along to change direction that you realise you ever had a choice. She didn't mean to tell the story, or have it end that way. She just got a little carried away. It has been several years since she confided in a teacher, but Molly Drayton is still feeling the aftershocks. When a chance meeting with a stranger leads to an offer of a room in exchange for telling her stories, she jumps at the chance. Slowly she builds a new, eccentric family around herself: Tim, her secretive boyfriend, who just might be a spy; Miranda, the lovelorn hairstylist; Liz, the lusty librarian; Mr. Roberts, landlord and listener; and his French wife, Mrs. Roberts. Much to Molly's surprise, she finds the stories she tells now are her key to creating a completely different life. Suddenly, her future is full of endless possibilities. The trouble is, Molly's not the only one telling tales. And the truth is always stranger than fiction. Sarah Salway's witty, finely-tuned and poignant story of many stories is a uniquely entrancing chronicle.
“I galloped through this … couldn’t stop once I’d started … spiky, sparky, pithy and deep”
Kate Long, author of The Bad Mother’s Handbook.
“Tell Me Everything by Sarah Salway would have to win my best book of 2007 award, if I had one. This book is magnificent. I opened it last night and didn’t stop reading it until I had finished. The nearest voice I can think to compare Sarah Salway’s to is Lorrie Moore’s and coming from me that is a big compliment.”
Bookeywookey
Return to top
SOMETHING
BEGINNING WITH
Verity Bell has very big eyes, alphabetical
leanings and a look that says she'd like
to get inside your brain somehow. Or so
her best friend Sally tells her, confessing
that back at their school, most children
thought she was a witch. Sally, a fellow
only-child to whom Verity has been glued
since girlhood, has become a worry in
her twenties because she has actually
allowed a married man to set her up in
a flat to be his mistress. Verity sees
no correlation whatsoever between this
retrograde and fairly shocking love-nest
and her own transforming passion for a
married man called John, who surely yearns
to leave his wife and three children to
be with her. Doesn't he? Verity lives
in a world of her own and we glimpse her
grudges (from 'ants' to the 'zeitgeist'),
her personal development (from 'ambition'
to 'wobbling') and her idiosyncratic network
of obsessions (pick a letter, any letter)
in a narrative arranged alphabetically
by topics in the most curious and satisfying
way.
“Verity
Bell is a very odd young woman, and this
delightfully original novel catalogues
her worries and weird flights of fancy,
arranged in alphabetical order…
Charming and darkly funny.”
Marie Claire
“Salway
has stitched together a delightful, original
novel that both guides you and makes you
search yourself. The novel explores love
and work, friendship and family, how people
are connected – or disconnected
– in various structures and the
extent to which we can restructure our
lives, keep making new beginnings.”
Mslexia
Return
to top
LEADING THE DANCE
Secrets and their consequences run deep
through Sarah Salway's short stories in
this haunting and sharply written collection.
A bored housewife welcomes the nomadic
painter of family pets into her home and
commissions a portrait of her fridge;
a schoolboy learns how to survive when
his gang turns against him; a man's life
is turned around when he hears his wife
make a new noise in bed, and in the title
story, a dance between husband and wife
at a school ceilidh turns into a battle
for survival. This is domestic life turned
on its head, with Salway's witty and economic
prose capturing the private moments of
transformation by some very different
characters on the edge.
"These short
stories explore the often wavering borderland
between love and boredom, sensuality and
repression, fidelity and betrayal. They
are written with a spare and subtle elegance."
D M Thomas, author of The White Hotel
"Leading the Dance is a brilliant
collection of short stories from the always
excellent Sarah Salway."
Authortrek
"Salway
is fearless in her choice of subjects:
she is good on contemporary themes of
love, betrayal and twenty-first century
isolation, as well as sensuality and violence...This
is energetic writing, ripe with menace
and wit."
The Stinging Fly
Return
to top
MESSAGES
MESSAGES is the result of an exciting
writing collaboration between Lynne Rees
and Sarah Salway. Ranging from moving
to the playful, the themes of love, sex,
life, death and chocolate all take their
place in this unique book of 300 pieces
of 300 words.
“It is
a beautiful tome…fat and square
and colourful and I have become addicted
to a few entries every night. This is
a gem of a book and I would encourage
anyone with even a passing interest in
something different to give it a go.”
Scott Pack
Return
to top
YOUR
MESSAGES (edited with Lynne Rees)
A spin-off anthology from the collaborative
classic "Messages" by Lynne
Rees & Sarah Salway, "Your Messages"
is a selection of original work by 41
out of 115 writers from all over the world
who took part in the online writing project
during November 2007. See www.yourmessages.org
for more information.
Return
to top
