"Dark, Salt, Clear is an extraordinary debut, a deeply researched and deeply felt work of narrative nonfiction. It is the kind of book that ziplines readers to a different world. You'll feel the damp sea air and smell the fish and ale in this vivid, multifaceted portrait of a hardworking, hard-drinking town and its salty residents, intimately connected to one another and to every aspect of its sea-to-market fishing industry. Ms. Ash explores questions about work, life and community and in so doing reflects on her own choices. On top of everything else, this book charts the author's own passage to maturity as she re-evaluates what matters to her." - Wall Street Journal

"I love this town and I love this book-both are imbued with the unadorned lessons of hard earned lives." --Mark Kurlansky, New York Times bestselling author of Cod, Salt, and Paper

"A gripping and affecting debut . . . Ash's remarkably empathetic take on a small town and its outsized contribution to the fishing industry is one to savor." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"An engaging book debut . . . Ash deftly weaves her own reflections with those of many other writers, including W.G. Sebald, Elizabeth Bishop, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, and Barry Lopez, as she considers the indelible connection of identity to geography. A graceful, lovely homage to people and place." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Lamorna Ash is a beautiful prose stylist-precise, perceptive, humane and sensitive-who somehow manages to write in a way that is both earthy and poetic. Her debut book-full of fish and blood and salt and oilskins-marks the birth of a new star of non-fiction." --William Dalrymple, author of THE ANARCHY

"With the heart of a novelist and the clarity of an ethnographer, Lamorna Ash reveals the Cornish fishing community of Newlyn in all its tension and hardship and wild joy. Dark, Salt, Clear is a book of deep immersion and a stunning debut from a brilliant writer." --Philip Marsden, author of RISING GROUND

"Ash writes with a maturity and wisdom that betrays her years and which took me to the very heart of Newlyn while questioning my sense of belonging. She opens up this traditional fishing town to reveal a close knit community struggling to stay afloat. Dark Salt, Clear is a captivating homage." --Lara Maiklem, author of MUDLARK

"Like some luminous fish risen from the deep, Dark Salt Clear bewitches with its radiance and intricacy. I can think of few other books in which such conscientious reporting maps onto a genuine love of place and history. Lamorna Ash is a revelation." --Rebecca Giggs, author of FATHOMS

"Compassionate realism illuminates this account of a working-class seaside village in England. . . Dark, Salt, Clear is above all a meditation on place, class, and generational identity . . . A sense of fierce belonging seems to exude from [Newlyn's residents] like fog from the sea. It's a feeling that calls to the author, as well." - Washington Independent Review of Books