Salt to publish Andrew Cowan novel

Salt will next year publish Your Fault, about one boy’s childhood from first memory to first love, by Andrew Cowan.

The novel, set in a 1960s English new town, is described as" a visceral novel of childhood, memory, and the inheritance of masculine guilt" as well as an untold story of British working class experience, written with extraordinary precision and tenderness by Cowan, who is the director of the creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia and a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year.

A year older in each chapter, Peter’s story is told to him by his future self as he attempts to recreate the optimism and futurism of the 1960s, and to reveal how that utopianism fares as it emerges into the Seventies.  

Christopher Hamilton-Emery, director of Salt, acquired world English language rights from Clare Alexander at Aitken Alexander Associates, and will publish in print and e-book in May next year.

“This fastidious, compelling and unsettling story perfectly captures the density and intensity of childhood experience and its seeming mysteries,” said Hamilton-Emery. “It is an exceptional work of literature.”

Your Fault is Cowan's sixth novel.