Saltwash
- Author Andrew Michael Hurley
- Narrator Phil Corbitt
- Publisher John Murray Press
- Publish Date 23 October 2025
- Run Time 6 hours and 7 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Fiction: general and literary, Folklore, myths and legends, Horror and supernatural fiction.
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What to expect
'Wildly atmospheric and truly chilling' Liz Jensen, Guardian
'Andrew Michael Hurley's spookiest novel yet . . . crunchingly arresting' The Times
'Folk horror for our times' Financial Times
'Charged with dread' TLS
ALL WILL BE FORGIVEN, IF ALL CAN BE FORGOTTEN.
The dilapidated seaside town of Saltwash isn't a place that Tom Shift would have chosen to come to at all, let alone on such a bleak November afternoon. But his new friend, Oliver Keele, has insisted on meeting for dinner at the Castle Hotel, where the owners, the Paleys, try their best to cling on to the glory days.
Both terminally ill, Tom and Oliver have been bound by the saddest of circumstances, though they have found some solace in writing to one another via a pen-pal scheme set up by their respective cancer clinics. So far, their friendship has been conducted solely through letters, with Oliver proving himself to be a treasury of literary quips and quotes. Yet, for all his flamboyance and verbosity, he is guarded, and Tom suspects that he is lonely and nomadic. And Oliver sees Tom for what he is too: a man haunted by guilt and desperate to try and atone in some way before it's too late.
Regret is what brings others to the Castle. Much to Tom's surprise, dozens more guests appear, dressed in their finest to take part in a prize draw that offers one person the chance of deliverance from their remorse. But does everyone deserve the opportunity?
'Andrew Michael Hurley's spookiest novel yet . . . crunchingly arresting' The Times
'Folk horror for our times' Financial Times
'Charged with dread' TLS
ALL WILL BE FORGIVEN, IF ALL CAN BE FORGOTTEN.
The dilapidated seaside town of Saltwash isn't a place that Tom Shift would have chosen to come to at all, let alone on such a bleak November afternoon. But his new friend, Oliver Keele, has insisted on meeting for dinner at the Castle Hotel, where the owners, the Paleys, try their best to cling on to the glory days.
Both terminally ill, Tom and Oliver have been bound by the saddest of circumstances, though they have found some solace in writing to one another via a pen-pal scheme set up by their respective cancer clinics. So far, their friendship has been conducted solely through letters, with Oliver proving himself to be a treasury of literary quips and quotes. Yet, for all his flamboyance and verbosity, he is guarded, and Tom suspects that he is lonely and nomadic. And Oliver sees Tom for what he is too: a man haunted by guilt and desperate to try and atone in some way before it's too late.
Regret is what brings others to the Castle. Much to Tom's surprise, dozens more guests appear, dressed in their finest to take part in a prize draw that offers one person the chance of deliverance from their remorse. But does everyone deserve the opportunity?
Critics Review
Crunchingly arresting . . . While his previous books have used the supernatural to convey the uncanniness of the world, here he cuts out the middleman and delivers the uncanny unmediated by anything beyond the human. The unexpected result is his spookiest novel. It's also, I'd suggest, the best
Andrew Michael Hurley has built his reputation on novels where the landscape itself seems alive . . . Saltwash pushes this further still, conjuring a desolate seaside town on the Lancashire coast as both stage and character, a place where the human and the elemental collapse into one another . . . Hurley is expert at withholding, at allowing the world to tilt degree by degree until the floor gives way . . . To reveal the precise terms of the ritual would be to rob the reader of that pleasure . . . A vision of England at the end of it's tether . . . This is folk horror for our moment, where the terror is not that the old gods might return, but that they have been living and working darkly within us all along
Wildy atmospheric . . . The driving animus of Hurley's fiction has always been place . . . he evokes the atmosphere and folklore of his settings with deft, idiosyncratic brushtrokes that bring the reader into territory as psychic, even mythic, as it is physical . . . The novel left me entertained, but also feeling raw, unsettled, existentially shaken. Welcoming on the outside, and increasingly unnerving as you reach the core of its gruesome, shocking proposition, Hurley's latest offering is Heart of Darkness wrapped in candy
Hurley's books are rooted in the gnarly traditions of English folk horror. There's a touch of MR James about Saltwash, and Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected . . . Hurley uses nature and architecture to construct an atmosphere at once foreboding and banal . . . Saltwash blends themes of decay both personal and general with a ticking tension
Charged with dread . . . taking place over the course of a single night in this restaurant, its sense of real-time duration adding to the slow-burn suspense that has made Hurley's novels justly renowned . . . an agonising tension reminiscent of Shirley Jackson
Really creepy
Andrew Michael Hurley serves up another helping of seaside desolation in his latest novel . . . the garish aesthetics of the backdrop heighten the uncanny sense of estrangement, as does the oddly generic quality of the dialogue . . . evoking a sense of eerie hollowness befitting the broken-spirited creatures who populate this tale . . . It's grisly denouement sets up a melancholy meditation on free will, absolution and the fragility of life
Hurley's evocative prose conjures an atmosphere of foreboding that is as much about the reader's fears as it is about the loneliness of the train station or the past misdeeds of the characters . . . Saltwash evokes some of the horror and menace of The Wicker Man . . . The sense of fear here is more unsettling, in the manner of some of Dahl's more macabre adult fiction, because it is rooted in the ordinary cycle of human life.
A novel of suspense that offers a fresh perspective on knowing our time on earth is finite
Hurley is a master of folk-horror, and he makes it known in Saltwash. His prose is . . . both high-octane and chilling to the bone. Saltwash is as forceful as a crashing ocean wave, and as compelling as an unrelenting current, pulling the reader in quick and fast, and adamantly refusing to release its commanding grip
Unsettling
PRAISE FOR ANDREW MICHAEL HURLEY'S NOVELS
Fascinating and curiously seductive . . . there is a deep sense of darkness
Thrilling, unsettling, ominous . . . like a knock at the door on a dark evening
Barrowbeck casts a real spell - or is it a curse?
Impeccable and beautifully drawn . . . Hurley has been rightly lauded in British folk-horror circles
I will confidently predict that no reader will guess where it's heading . . . Hurley's ability to create a world that's like ours in many ways and really not in many others is again on full display
Superb . . . Hurley leads you up on to the moors . . . dropping sinister hints at devilment and demonic possession. Then he changes course, scuffs over prints in the snow, springs new villainies on you, and abandons you overnight inthe hills'
Full of unnerving horror . . . Amazing
| Author | Andrew Michael Hurley |
|---|---|
| Narrator | Phil Corbitt |
| Duration | 6 hours and 7 minutes |
| Release Date | |
| ISBN | 9781399817578 |
| Format | Audiobook |
| Publisher | John Murray Press |
| Genre | Fiction: general and literary, Folklore, myths and legends, Horror and supernatural fiction |
| Availability | AU, GB, IE |
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