Saltburn
Drew Gummerson
Paperback
208pp
Publication date: 26 February 2025
ISBN: 9781804471548
£10
May the residents of the real Saltburn-by-the-Sea and neighbouring towns forgive my mermaids, my nuclear power stations, my foetus museums and so on and so on. They were written with love.
Welcome to Saltburn, an extraordinary town on the English coast with sweeping poverty and nuclear fallout, where young lovers, radioactive and lusty, fall in love, and sea creatures work at the local penny arcade.
In a series of interconnected short stories a young orphan is taken in by an alchemist, and falls in love with a mermaid. The son of a glove manufacturer is sent to Paris on business, where he falls for a deep-sea diver. One schoolboy bites another, gains psychic abilities and realises they will one day be in love. A rock salesman exposes a cover-up by big business and frees kidnapped women.
In startling prose that could have been concocted by a hallucinating Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski, Saltburn is a town – and a book – like no other.
Drew Gummerson is a novelist and award-winning short-story writer of books including The Lodger, Me and Mickie Jamesand, more recently, Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel. He is a Lambda Award finalist, and won the Leicestershire Short Story Prize. His stories have been featured on BBC Radio 4 and in various anthologies. Drew lives in Leicestershire.