Silver and Salt — Elanor Dymott

A beautifully crafted novel about the tragic effects of a devastating childhood.

“There was a child in our courtyard. I saw a child there, standing by the fountain. She was there, then she was gone.”

On the death of the celebrated photographer Max Hollingbourne, his daughter, Ruthie, returns to his villa in Greece after fifteen years in exile. The youngest and estranged member of a once close-knit London family, Ruthie is haunted by a dark secret from her childhood, one that fractured her family and drove her mother to madness.

Still, following her father's death, she and her older sister, Vinny, manage to build a fragile happiness at the villa where they had spent their summers as girls. But the arrival of an English family at a neighboring cottage, and the presence of one young girl in particular, trigger a chain of events that will plunge both women back into their harrowing pasts with shocking and fatal consequences.

Haunting, lyrical, and beautifully crafted, SILVER AND SALT is a profoundly moving novel about the consequences of love and betrayal.