Salt imprint: 113 books

The stories in The Manet Girl explore sexual relations – from both male and female points of view – in the present, but sometimes with a backdrop of several decades. Stories of desire and confusion – other men and other women – sit alongside stories of art – galleries, studios, allusions...

A girl meets with danger on the beach when she is lured away by a strange boy; a bereaved wife enlists the help of a mysterious woman to perform rituals that will bring her dead husband back to life; a boy's anger at his absent father leads him towards an act of destruction in the basement of his...

Shortlisted for the Portico Prize 2012. Gloria, meet Stephen. He’s your dead brother’s best friend. He’s also a liar, and he doesn’t want to hand over your brother’s belongings. He’s got a hair collection, and he’s got somebody’s teeth hidden in a drawer. An inconvenient spider’s...

Now a major motion picture Manchester, the present. Michael divides his time between the job centre and the pub. A chance meeting with Lee, an introduction to her ‘Uncle’ Ian, and a heavy night on the lash lead to a job working the door at a Northern Quarter massage parlour. After...

John is infinite. He can become any book, any combination of words – every thought, act and expression that has ever been, or ever will be, written. Now 800 years old, John wants to tell his story. Looking back over his life, from its beginnings with a medieval anchoress to his current...

Michele is a successful business woman with a troubled private life. She has a high-powered job, a family, a husband, yet she is defined by a term of possession: she is ‘Clara’s daughter’. Nameless. When Michele moves her mother into the basement, her husband slams the door and disappears into...

Trine and her mother live in a cottage on the German coast. The mudflats that surround them disappear and reappear with the North Sea tides. The family leads a lonely existence, but each person has adapted in their own way. Anna roams the beaches collecting flotsam and jetsam to make art, while Trine...

This passionate new book gathers together for the first time many of Vanessa Gebbie’s award-winning stories. Described by Maggie Gee as ‘a prodigiously gifted new writer’, this is a natural storyteller; her narratives unfold with a deceptively light touch, exploring with compassion what it is...

For childminder Bobbi, it’s all about keeping your babies safe When professional couple Nikki and Rob uncover their childminder Bobbi’s secret everything changes. Bobbi has a child-shaped hole in her life that her ‘silver fox’ lover can’t fill. Now she is seeking out children once...

Can the EDL offer hope? Jack is joining up Jon Gale was winner of Writing on the Wall’s ‘Pulp Idol competition’ in 2012. Jack Garrity is a disaffected, frustrated and damaged eighteen year old, growing up in twenty first century Britain. His search for identity leads him into the...

It is a foggy day. Ruby Grummett, a railway crossing keeper, opens the gates for a council lorry, thinking that the Skegness train has been cancelled, but it comes looming through the mists and hits the lorry, which is flung into the air. The train is derailed, one man is killed and another seriously...

Tracey, a teenage single parent in London’s East End, pregnant for a second time, is desperate not to end up like her mother: overworked and defeated. Denny Brown was first prize winner of the 2012 Café Three Zero Short Story Competition and was shortlisted for the 2012 Writers Reign Short...

Plastic Jesus grabs you by the throat. From the opening paragraph, without warning, it plunges you into a world of fear and confusion and visceral emotion. When it spews you back out again, you are left dizzy, overwhelmed – and desperate to read more. And it’s then that you take your first fearful...

A young man sits on a bench looking out at the harbour of a ­French-Spanish border town. Ahead of him, either a ­cash-strapped existence strolling the sun-baked avenues of Seville, where deep shadows conceal a sense of uncanny potential, or the cooler embrace of the daily grind back in the US. Granville,...