Salt to the Sea

Salt to the Sea is a historical novel for young readers by Ruta Sepetys, published in 2016. It follows four narrators through the winter of 1945 as they move west across East Prussia towards the Baltic, where the German navy is evacuating civilians ahead of the Soviet advance, and their paths meet aboard the liner Wilhelm Gustloff.

The narrators are a Lithuanian nurse, a Polish girl, a German boy and a Prussian sailor, and each of them has a reason not to be identified. Sepetys also folds in the disappearance of the Amber Room, a decorated chamber taken by the Nazis and never recovered, which gives one of the characters a quieter second errand to carry.

Sepetys wrote the book because she wanted to recover an episode of the war that is rarely taught: the sinking of the Gustloff in January 1945 drowned several thousand people, most of them civilians and children. She keeps the chapters short and alternates the four voices, so the novel reads as parallel journeys tightening towards a single night, and it was awarded the Carnegie Medal in 2017.