Salvage by Gee Williams
A short break in a shoreline cottage is an ideal place to struggle with your demons. For Elly and Martin it is the chance to forget their hasty exit from Paradise following scandal. But she makes a life-changing find on the tideline. It is a huge pink diamond ring, finger bones still attached.
Scroll back a few months and at Martin's place of work, a Chester hospital – we meet new nurse Hayley. Twenty-five; gorgeous (even by her own admission); she is a player, and totally turned off by the ward surgeon, Richard Congreve. Until, that is, she catches a whiff of something expensive in his Jag and is ensnared by a gift so desirable it may prove fatal. As we begin to question who the ring and its finger really belong to, the cottage collects the secrets of those friends and strangers who have stayed there. Why has Elly such power over them all?
Ranging between Wales, the north of England and Goa, this is a novel about possession, betrayal, violence – and just how much we can afford to lose.
Look inside: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 (PDF)
Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award, 2007-08
Pure Gold Winner, English category, Estyn Allan, north Wales libraries
Longlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award, 2007-08
Pure Gold Winner, English category, Estyn Allan, north Wales libraries
"She could win {the JTB} competition" and other great reviews Read here
Talking to: Gee Williams
Alcemi: Why did you choose a hospital setting for your novel, Salvage?Gee: My father became seriously ill within a couple of years of my birth. Hospitals hold the earliest and most powerful memories for me - children were not allowed on the wards and I spent hours waiting in corridors, watching and listening. A modern hospital gives a writer a rare opportunity. Without falling back on melodrama, there's life versus death everywhere you look. And it's unacknowledged conflict, usually. It's an atmosphere that breeds more virulent organisms than MRSA, amongst patients and staff alike.
A: What does “salvage” mean to you in the novel?
G: I played around with several titles – in the end Salvage won because it said: chance discovery, the getting hold of property that rightly belongs to someone else - usually someone in distress. But in more general terms it describes how most of the characters are living. To stay functional, they are all just salvaging what they can - and then getting inventive with it once they've heaved it up the beach.
“Everybody knows the fountains roundabout, for God's sake - it's so "Chester". Shiny shrubs - all neat edges. Five jets of white water about two storeys high. You wouldn't get one of those in Newcastle. By the end of the first week it would've filled up with Geordies floating in a lager-sick mix.”
A: Who's your favourite character?G: My favourite character has to be Elly. I've never found myself in the sort of metaphorical hole she finds herself in at the beginning of the book but if I did I hope ( like her) I'd come up with a plan to deal with it.
Favourite film? Pulp Fiction is the only film I'll always want to watch again - unless I've got flu, then it's Some Like It Hot.
Most memorable dream? I speak to the dead - it never ends well.
Favourite villain? Easy – Mrs Norris from Mansfield Park… why did Fanny Price not poison her? I invent ever more foolproof ways for her to do it.
Gee Williams is a poet and the prize-winning author of two short story collections. Numerous full length plays and short fiction pieces of hers have been broadcast on BBC radio. Salvage is her first novel.
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Rights enquiries: Worldwide rights for this book are available. Contact Marinella Magri / www.ilcaduceo.it