salt slow

Salt Slow is a debut collection of short stories by the British writer Julia Armfield, published in 2019.

The pieces are concerned with bodies and with what can be done to them. In one, teenagers are hungry in a way that ordinary food will not answer; in another, a whole city cannot sleep; in a third, pieces of one person are assembled into somebody better. The settings are the ordinary places of schools and small coastal towns, which are then invaded by something else, so that the mythical and the gothic arrive in a kitchen or a classroom rather than in a castle. The characters are usually in motion, turning away from something, turning back towards it, or turning into something else. The collection was published as the author's first book, and the stories in it are short enough to be read in a single sitting.