Salt — Isabel Zuber

In this beautifully crafted debut novel, poet Isabel Zuber deftly traces the joys and the sorrows of a passionate but troubled marriage in Appalachia at the turn of the last century.

Anna Stockton was a bright and imaginative child, reveling in a rare wild freedom in the mountains of western North Carolina. As a young woman possessed by romantic yearnings and a great love of books, she hungers for a new kind of life for herself. John Bayley is a hard-driven hill farmer who carries with him the pain of the early death of his father and the loss of two previous wives. When a sudden encounter brings the two together, Anna and John marry into a difficult and passionate union, one that mirrors the changing, sometimes violent, and often haunted times in which they live.

Turning her jeweler's eye upon the members of a small rural community, Isabel Zuber weaves together the lives of John and Anna's family and friends in a deeply moving account of exultation and despair, of grief and ghosts. A novel worthy of the element that gives it its name -- an emblem of work and sacrifice as well as of blessing and preservation -- Salt is entrancing, piercingly honest fiction that gazes deeply into the human heart and yields the wisdom that such scrutiny brings.