Salt lands new collection of short stories from Taylor

Salt has landed a new collection of short stories celebrating Norfolk from D J Taylor. 

Director Jen Hamilton-Emery acquired world rights, excluding North America, from Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown for Stewkey Blues. Salt will publish the book in paperback on 1st March 2022.

Stewkey Blues is rooted in Norfolk and follows characters who have lived there all their lives as well as short-term residents or passage migrants. The synopsis says: "Whether young or old, self-confident, or ground-down, local or blow-in, all of them are reaching uneasy compromises with the world they inhabit and the landscape in which that life takes place."

Taylor said "Short story collections usually harvest the results of a decade or so's commissions. But this one, in which all the pieces are newly-written, emerged out of the 2020 lockdown, a time when I was pretty much confined to my home county of Norfolk. As well as being a love-letter to the Great Eastern Land, to which I joyfully returned 20 years ago, they are an attempt to convey the sheer oddity of the place and the effect that it has on the people who live there."

Hamilton-Emery added: "D J Taylor was born and bred in Norfolk and has gone on to become one of the county's most celebrated writers. As a Norfolk-based publisher, we are thrilled to be publishing this collection of stories, based in and around this fascinating and varied county. From Stiffkey's Stewkey Blues (cockles) in the north, to the wilds of Breckland in the south, this collection is as much a celebration of place as it is of lives lived."