Salt Upon the Water
1836. When the liberated, mixed heritage Clarissa FitzRoy lands on the glittering shores of the South Australian coast, she has one purpose: to confront the Surveyor-General Colonel William Light about her past, and find her missing mother. For Light, Clarissa’s arrival is a flashpoint, upending the new colony and compelling him to face both his complicity in colonial violence and the promise of a different future. But Clarissa has agendas of her own, and the tidal force of their reunion will reveal one final, devastating secret.
Sweeping from the pleasure gardens of London to the canals of Venice, the streets of Calcutta to the island of Penang, Lyn Dickens’ award-winning novel is a love story blending magical realism with historical detail, charting the shattering effects of the British East India Company across the globe. A ground-breaking, poetic debut.
“Written in lyrical, sensual and teasing tones, Salt Upon the Water is the tale of an indomitable woman caught in the littoral space between love and race, class and gender ... Dickens has a fine eye for detail and disturbance, skilfully weaving her intriguing narrative between history and romance.” - Brian Castro
“Resonant and lyrical, Salt Upon the Water celebrates the emergence of a powerful new voice in Australian literature.”
- Hossein Asgari
“Lyn Dickens is a distinctive and poetic voice. A fragrant and fierce act of narrative reclamation.” - Anna Goldsworthy
“An epic love story and an account of betrayals large and small, it offers a sobering vision of the ways the violence of the colonial encounter reverberated through so many lives, and in such startlingly different ways.” - Patrick Flanery
Available in Audiobook and Print
“thoughtful, detailed and lyrical.” – The Asian Review of Books
“Lyn Dickens’ lyrical writing imbues her novel with a magical aura” – The Historical Novel Society
“Salt Upon the Water is distinctive, imaginative, carefully researched and very enjoyable.”- The Newtown Review of Books
Salt Upon the Water “writes into South Australia’s colonial history with a broad imaginative canvas, a poetic touch, and a deep empathy for the discrimination its characters face.” – The Sydney Morning Herald