Silver & Salt

From the author of Every Contact Leaves a Trace, comes a startling and unforgettable story of two sisters, and of the lies a family tells in order to survive

I loved and admired Silver and Salt. It manages to be both very clever and entirely absorbing. I return to the settings in my mind long after finishing the book, and find myself thinking about the characters as if they were people I knew, while also respecting Elanor Dymott’s way with a sentence

Elegant and atmospheric, Silver and Salt is written with a calm lucidity that is both seductive and unnerving. You start to feel that anything could be revealed in that sharp Greek sunlight, and then it is

Beautifully and movingly realized... Dymott has the ability which so many novelists lack to make essentially good people interesting and convincing… Dymott is a novelist of obvious talent

I read Silver &amp; Salt as if in a trance. Elanor Dymott is a master of delicate psychological suspense, treading gently but with devastating precision until every detail of this very sad story is revealed and embedded in the reader's mind, possibly forever.

Elena Lappin, author of WHAT LANGUAGE DO I DREAM IN

Beautifully detailed with a profound sense of place and the intricate clues woven through the fabric of the novel build up to a tragic finale.

Silver &amp; Salt juxtaposes the precise mechanics of the photographic process with the fluidity of memory to great effect. Dymott… skillfully suggests how people – not just pictures – are all too susceptible to atmospheric conditions.

A beautifully observed and shattering exploration of grief as their family’s tragic past is revealed.

Fans of psychological suspense are sure to be hooked.

She continues to delve into the minds of characters who have experienced some kind of trauma. The book is beautifully grafted, the action swinging from present to past and back again. It is at times lyrical, moving and profoundly disturbing. Dymott shows great psychological insight into the minds of the two girls and their troubles.

The gruelling and fascinating process of photographic development reads like its own sort of poetry in this gut-wrenching, achingly intimate look at grief and how closely art and life intertwine, for better or worse.

Elanor Dymott was born in Chingola, Zambia, in 1973. She was educated in the USA and England and spent parts of her childhood in South East Asia, where she later worked. Her first novel, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, was published in 2012. She lives in London.

'With the tension of a Nicci French thriller, the intellectual fizz of Donna Tartt's The Secret History and the very best of Maggie O'Farrell's unnerving readability, Dymott is a classy storyteller' Elle 
 
From the author of Every Contact Leaves a Trace comes a story of family and the lies we tell in order to survive 
 
Following the death of her famous father, Ruthie returns to the family villa in remote, wild Greece. 
 
 After fifteen years in exile she is welcomed by her older sister, Vinny. They build a fragile happiness in their haven above the sea, protecting one another from the dark secrets of their childhood. 
 
 But the arrival of an English family at a neighbouring cottage, and one young girl in particular, triggers a chain of events that will plunge both women back into the past, with shocking and fatal consequences. 
 
---- 
 
'I read Silver and Salt as if in a trance. Elanor Dymott is a master of delicate psychological suspense' Elena Lappin, author of What Language Do I Dream in? 
 
'Beautifully detailed with a profound sense of place and the intricate clues woven through the fabric of the novel build up to a tragic finale' Daily Express 
 
'A beautifully observed and shattering exploration of grief as their family's tragic past is revealed' Woman &amp; Home

Every Contact Leaves A Trace

Part love story, part murder-mystery, and with shades of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Kazuo Ishiguro, this is an extraordinary literary thriller guaranteed to make your heart beat faster and faster...

A startlingly original blend of mystery, love story and emotional journey...not be missed

An exquisite, creepy and unexpectedly sexy murder mystery...with the tension of a Nicci French thriller, the intellectual fizz of Donna Tatt’s The Secret History and the very best of Maggie O’Farrell’s unnerving readability, Dymott is a classy storyteller... Read this novel now before everyone else starts talking about it

A powerful meditation on grief, love and the nature of uncertainty

A compelling mystery... I highly recommend it to anyone looking for an intelligent page turner

In addition to creating a cleverly calibrated and creepy murder mystery, Dymott has also fashioned a neatly tailored exploration of the desperate psychology of loss... This is a cunning, sharp first novel that revels in keeping one in the dark

It’s rare to feel so completely inside someone’s head

Elanor Dymott's arresting debut...combines the pleasures of a thriller with an elegiac meditation on the trials of youth

A dark clever campus novel that draws the reader into a skilfully woven web of half-told stories... Crafted and elegantly written

Dymott’s capacity to conjure striking imagery is exceptional. This is more than a murder mystery. It’s an examination of the subjectivity of accounts of truth. It’s a desperately moving love story about a lonely man who finds salvation in another only to have his idyll destroyed. It's a tale of revenge, served cold and deadly

This is a love story, told in reverse, a haunting tale of youth and lost love, and a poetical thriller.A powerful debut and a distinctive voice

Elanor Dymott’s gorgeous debut novel is a murder mystery that’s also a brilliant meditation on love and memory and loss.  Like the Robert Browning poems her characters read at Oxford, the book is spooky, lovesick, dark, and lush, its narrator circling obsessively back on the death at its heart

An irresistible blast of an opening which never disappoints in a journey into a complex knot of intense and ultimately destructive relationships from which the murder that is the dark core ofThis excellent debut novel distills

A beautiful, lucid nightmare of a book.  A mystery of love and murder that is elegantly written, disturbing, always compelling, and lingers long in the mind

A literary thriller wrapped up in a whodunit love story, Elanor Dymott's debut makes for compulsive reading. The complexity of the plot put me in mind of The Secret History; 
it deserves to reach just as wide an audience

John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Every Contact Leaves a Trace is beautifully paced, from the graphic event at its start through all its shifting possibilities to its strange, logical conclusion. It is a marvelous book

This murder mystery...gripped me with unusual force... This novel sucks you in beautifully, and will not let you go

This is a class act which unveils its secrets as tantalisingly as a courtesan

Wonderfully evocative of Oxford, this is a love story and a mystery that will keep you guessing

Part love story, part murder mystery… Dymott’s novel is ample proof of the literary flair that lurks within some lawyers

One of the best books I’ve read this year

'If you were to ask me to tell you about my wife, I would have to warn you at the outset that I don't know a great deal about her. Or at least, not as much as I thought I did...' 
 
Alex is a solitary London lawyer who is deeply in love with his beautiful wife, Rachel. When Rachel is brutally murdered one Midsummer Night in Oxford, all of his happiness vanishes. Shrouded in shock and grief, he returns to Oxford that winter and begins to try to piece together the mystery surrounding Rachel’s death, discovering in her wake a tangled web of sex and jealousy, of would-be lovers and spiteful friends, of blackmail, and of revenge.

Elanor Dymott

Often, the best books work on you subcutaneously, by accretion, not letting you know precisely what they’re about until days or even weeks after you’ve finished them... Vivid and memorable… Slack-Tide is a fierce and often very funny send-up of a generation of men who think they can have their cake and eat it.

Slack-Tide, Elanor Dymott's captivating third novel, is sharp in many ways… [it’s] so convincingly – and, at times, so disastrously – funny… But what makes Slack-Tide distinct is its brilliant depiction of both romantic rapture and heartfelt delusion.

Forensic and spare, Slack-Tide is a persuasively messy (and sinister) tale of mixed-up emotions.

Dymott writes particularly well on sex, and is refreshingly comfortable with the ambiguities at play in each encounter. This psychologically intelligent study... packs a very precise punch.

When two people meet is it need, fantasy or love? Slack-Tide takes us on an urgent journey and kept me reading late into the night.

A compelling and beautiful reflection on the stories that hold us together and keep us apart.

I finished Slack-Tide after a heady, intense few days of reading. Elanor Dymott writes with such lucidity and precision; her characters, setting and premise are real and involving – I enjoyed it immensely.

Slack-Tide is hypnotically compelling. It asks how you can ever get the measure of your own needs, let alone the needs of another, and how difficult it is to mesh your life with theirs. Her lovers are experienced, flawed, damaged and demanding, but she won’t let them be fooled or floored by emotion... Dymott shows that what you want is not always what you need. That the price exacted by finding yourself can be having to let another go.

This novel has the urgency and readability of a whodunit, with an emotional intensity that draws you in, mercilessly, and then spits you back out again… Sharp and potent, this novel explores what it’s like to fall in love and have your heart broken… [it’s] passion at its most convincing.

‘A brilliant depiction of both romantic rapture and heartfelt delusion’ (Daily Telegraph), Slack-Tide is the new sucker punch of a novel from Elanor Dymott, author of Every Contact Leaves a Trace 
 
It is four years since the loss of a child broke her marriage, and Elizabeth is fiercely protective of her independence. She meets Robert – exuberant, generous, apparently care-free – and they fall in love with breath-taking speed. 
 
 Slack-Tide tracks the ebbs and flows of the affair: passionate, coercive, intensely sexual. When you’ve known lasting love and lost it, what price will you pay to find it again? 
 
‘When two people meet is it need, fantasy or love? Slack-Tide takes us on an urgent journey and kept me reading late into the night’ Esther Freud

Elanor Dymott

Praise for Slack-Tide

Often, the best books work on you subcutaneously, by accretion, not letting you know precisely what they’re about until days or even weeks after you’ve finished them... Vivid and memorable… Slack ...

Slack-Tide, Elanor Dymott's captivating third novel, is sharp in many ways… [it’s] so convincingly – and, at times, so disastrously – funny… But what makes Slack-Tide distinct is i ...

**Forensic and spare, Slack-Tide is a persuasively messy (and sinister) tale of mixed-up emotions.**

Often, the best books work on you subcutaneously, by accretion, not letting you know precisely what they’re about until days or even weeks after you’ve finished them... Vivid and memorable… Slack ...

Slack-Tide, Elanor Dymott's captivating third novel, is sharp in many ways… [it’s] so convincingly – and, at times, so disastrously – funny… But what makes Slack-Tide distinct is i ...

**Forensic and spare, Slack-Tide is a persuasively messy (and sinister) tale of mixed-up emotions.**

Often, the best books work on you subcutaneously, by accretion, not letting you know precisely what they’re about until days or even weeks after you’ve finished them... Vivid and memorable… Slack ...

Slack-Tide, Elanor Dymott's captivating third novel, is sharp in many ways… [it’s] so convincingly – and, at times, so disastrously – funny… But what makes Slack-Tide distinct is i ...

**Forensic and spare, Slack-Tide is a persuasively messy (and sinister) tale of mixed-up emotions.**

Books by Elanor Dymott

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