Daisy Parker · Novelist
Opening line · The Salt in Our Hands
Latest
Three sisters return to a drowning stretch of the Norfolk coast to empty their mother's house, and discover that the tide keeps its own version of events. A novel about water, inheritance, and the things a family quietly agrees never to say.
the kind of book you finish and immediately press on a friend.
A marriage measured out across one long winter beside a cold sea.
quiet — and then, all at once, it isn't.
A widowed ornithologist, a granddaughter who won't come indoors, and a spring that arrives a month too early.
I have reread the last chapter three times.
Twelve linked stories, each set in the hour before the light.
her debut — already unmistakably hers.
Portrait — to come
Daisy Parker is the author of four novels. Her work is set mostly along the eroding coasts of eastern England, and returns again and again to water — what it takes, what it gives back changed, and the long weather of grief that follows a family from one tide to the next.
Her debut, A Catalogue of Small Hours, began as a sequence of stories written in the hour before her shift at a Cromer bookshop. Three novels later, The Salt in Our Hands was named a book of the year by readers and booksellers alike.
She lives on the Norfolk coast and writes in a shed that floods, dependably, twice a year.
Praise
“Parker writes the sea better than almost anyone alive — and uses it, every time, to get at something true about us.”The Saturday Review
“Unshowy, unhurried, and quietly devastating.”Marlowe & Finch, booksellers
“I finished it on the train and then sat there, past my stop.”A reader, by post
Every novel comes with a reading-group guide — discussion questions, a note on where the book began, and, more often than not, a recipe. They’re free. Write to hello [at] daisyparkerbooks.com and tell me which one.
A few times a year: a new book, a reading nearby, the occasional thing learned the hard way. No more often than the tide turns worth mentioning.