Love Like Salt

Product Description

'Did Clara taste salty when I kissed her? She did. She tasted of mermaids, of the sea.'

LOVE LIKE SALT is a deeply affecting memoir, beautifully and intelligently written. It is about mothers and daughters, music and illness, genes and inheritance, writing and story-telling. It is about creating joy from the hand you've been dealt and following its lead - in this case to rural France, where the author and her family lived for seven years. And back again.

'I had always written, and until the birth of Clara I wrote for a living. Once I knew the Cystic Fibrosis gene had unfolded itself in our daughter's body, like a paper flower meeting water, I felt that to write, even if I had had time, or been able, would have been to squander a kind of power which was needed for tending and nurturing. Every moment became a moment in which I protected my baby. Some of it I did in secret, like a madwoman muttering spells. I thought of her as a candle, cupping my hand around her.'Did Clara taste salty when I kissed her? She did. She tasted of mermaids, of the sea.'

LOVE LIKE SALT is a deeply affecting memoir, beautifully and intelligently written. It is about mothers and daughters, music and illness, genes and inheritance, writing and story-telling. It is about creating joy from the hand you've been dealt and following its lead - in this case to rural France, where the author and her family lived for seven years. And back again.

'I had always written, and until the birth of Clara I wrote for a living. Once I knew the Cystic Fibrosis gene had unfolded itself in our daughter's body, like a paper flower meeting water, I felt that to write, even if I had had time, or been able, would have been to squander a kind of power which was needed for tending and nurturing. Every moment became a moment in which I protected my baby. Some of it I did in secret, like a madwoman muttering spells. I thought of her as a candle, cupping my hand around her.
Affecting and beautifully written maternal memoir which muses on music and illness, genes and inheritance, writing and storytelling . . . an ultimately uplifting book about resilience and living the best life you can, even in the shadow of illness; and creating joy from the hand you've been dealt - Bookseller, 'editor's choice'

Motherhood, medicine and music are explored with a spellbinding intensity. This memoir is beautifully written and entirely emotionally honest . . . a celebration of a family who are determined to live as luminous a life as possible, to make a kind of poetry out of the everyday - Psychologies, 'Book of the Month'

An extraordinarily beautiful and mysterious book about parenthood and the random blows that life deals us, as well as the quest to belong, the life of the mind and, ultimately, love. And what glorious prose: Helen Stevenson has a conjuror's knack of seeming to throw everything in, and creating not a jumble, but something that makes absolute, awe-inspiring sense

A touching memoir about motherhood and illness that teaches powerful lessons about resilience and finding joy where you can - Good Housekeeping

This memoir is full of seeming tricks from fairy stories that turn out to have the weight of science behind them - Daily Telegraph