Love Like Salt

A deeply affecting memoir of motherhood, beautifully and intelligently written. The author's eldest daughter has Cystic Fibrosis, one of the most common, life-threatening inherited diseases, for which there is no cure. Her youngest daughter is healthy. This memoir is about living the best life you can, even in the shadow of illness. It is about creating joy from the hand you've been dealt.

'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.