DARK, SALT, CLEAR

A Londoner goes to sea.

Making an engaging book debut, Ash offers a gently told memoir recounting several extended visits to Newlyn, a Cornwall fishing village to which she feels “unwittingly bound”: Her mother was born there and named Lamorna for a small local cove. Ash captures the color and rhythms of a close-knit community where life, livelihood, and death center on the sea, and “if there is a case one person believes in, it rapidly becomes a village-wide concern.” Generously welcomed by fishermen and supplied with seasickness pills, she embarked on day-boats and trawlers, sometimes for days at a time. She learned to gut, fillet, and box fish, tasks—such as stabbing a huge stingray in its heart—that sometimes left her repulsed. “My physical connection to those fish,” she admits, “the literal opening of their bodies and directing my attention to the secrets inside of them, engenders a permanent change to the way I view fish when back on land.” For the 20-something Londoner, life at sea seemed to be “a kind of monastic existence: imprisoned and yet free, roaming, but in the most confined space possible.” In evocative detail, she depicts the unique personality of each boat—“the particular wheezing, spluttery cough of each engine”—and each fisherman, some of whom became her confidants; others, drinking buddies. Younger fishermen, especially, expressed their urgent concern with sustainability and worry about humankind’s “potentially devastating impact on the oceans.” Ash deftly weaves her own reflections with those of many other writers, including W.G. Sebald, Elizabeth Bishop, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, and Barry Lopez, as she considers the indelible connection of identity to geography. “Though your body is in the harbour once more,” she notes, after getting back on land, “for a long time your mind is still at sea.”

A graceful, lovely homage to people and place.