A Story Rooted in Landscape

This week’s Tuesday Book Club comes with salt on the air and wind in the reeds. We’re reading Salt by Jeremy Page, a novel that seems to rise straight out of the marshes—timeless, elemental, and quietly unsettling.

The book feels particularly close this time. I was recently able to return to one of my favourite places in the world: Cley-next-the-Sea, on the North Norfolk coast. If you’ve been there, you’ll know what I mean when I say it’s unlike anywhere else. The marshes stretch on endlessly, blurring the line between land, water and sky. The light softens in a way that feels dreamlike, as if the world were holding its breath.

Salt captures something of that atmosphere. Not just the landscape, but the feeling you get when standing in a place where nature doesn’t just sit quietly in the background—it surrounds you, shapes you, and could, at any moment, sweep you away.

What’s Salt about?

Set on the shifting margins of the Norfolk coast, Salt tells the story of three generations of the Dodds family, who live on the edge—both literally and figuratively. They inhabit a world of creeks and dykes, of superstition and solitude, where the past lingers like mist and family histories feel as elemental as the tides.

The writing is spare and evocative, steeped in folklore and landscape. Page doesn’t just describe the salt marshes—he writes from within them. The novel moves between intimacy and myth, the deeply personal and the timeless. It’s a story about inheritance, loss, and our strange, often fraught relationship with the forces that shape us—both human and natural.

Why It matters

Books like Salt don’t just tell a story—they connect us to place. They remind us of how the land around us holds memory, emotion, even identity. For me, reading Salt was like standing again on the coast at Cley, feeling the sting of the spray on my lips and the awareness that this landscape has always had its own rhythm, its own will.

There’s a sense of equipoise in a place like that; a balance we maintain with nature that feels both beautiful and precarious. Page captures that perfectly.

Let’s talk about it

Have you read Salt? Did it resonate with you? And do you have a place—somewhere deeply personal—that feels tied to a particular book? Somewhere that changed how you read a story, or where the story changed how you saw the place?

We’d love to hear about it. Join the conversation at #TuesdayBookClub, #Salt and #JeremyPage on X (formerly Twitter) and Bluesky.