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As Meat Loves Salt Maria McCann

As Meat Loves Salt By Maria McCann

As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann


£14.99
Condition - Very Good
5 in stock

Summary

Jacob is an educated manservant in a loyalist household. He is fearful of being identified as the murderer of a local boy, and is forced to flee on the day of his wedding feast, dragging his new wife with him. He proceeds to wreak havoc on the lives of others, but mostly on his own fortunes.

As Meat Loves Salt Summary

As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann

Transplant Othello to the tumult of a country in social and political flux and en route to regicide -- England in the 1640s -- and render him uncertain about his sexuality, and you have the makings of Jacob Cullen, one of the most commanding characters in contemporary writing. As the book opens, Jacob is an educated, vigorous and dauntingly strong manservant in a Royalist household, who has begun to imbibe god-fearing revolutionary pamphlets. He is on the brink of marriage to his virginal sweetheart, but is unsure of his emotional needs, and in possession of a boiling point he reaches all too often. He is also, we learn, fearful of being identified as the murderer of a local boy, and a potential nemesis arrives on the very day of his wedding feast, prompting the first of a series of impetuous, temper-fuelled bad decisions: Jacob flees, dragging his new wife and one of his brothers with him. Thereafter he proceeds to wreak havoc on the lives of others but mostly on his own fortunes - as a servant, a husband, a brother, a soldier, and, critically, as friend, co-conspirator and lover of another man disaffected by the lurch from freedom to tyranny now apparent in Cromwell's New Model Army. To step outside the law, outside the state, outside the established and natural order of things seems to supply the only prospect of happiness...All this makes for a truly heady historical narrative: gripping, unusual, packed with heady ingredients - truly, we are in a world turned upside down by political fervour, inflammatory pamphleteering, social flux, grisly combat, apocalyptically evangelical Christianity, sexual confusion, and murder most foul...The earthy, tangy quality of McCann's Republican-style prose, infused with a fresh twentieth-century sensibility, makes the whole entirely accessible and irresistible. Is this then perhaps the first great novel of the English Revolution?

As Meat Loves Salt Reviews

'Few novels in a reader's year live in the mind as this one does. It's beautifully written, spare, with moments of poetry. Surely flesh has never been described with such a combination of pathology and beauty.' GILLIAN CLARKE

About Maria McCann

Maria McCann was born in Liverpool in 1956 and spent most of her childhood there devouring novels at every opportunity. She read English at the University of Durham and then embarked on a series of jobs including Citizens' Advice, telephonist, artist's model and EFL teacher. Since 1988 she has been a Lecturer in English at a Somerset college. An Arvon course gave her the confidence to write after years of 'scribbling' and she later read for an MA in Writing at the University of Glamorgan. She loves plays, gin, dancing and dogs. This is her first novel.

Additional information

GOR001077562
9780002261944
0002261944
As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann
Used - Very Good
Hardback
HarperCollins Publishers
20010219
544
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - As Meat Loves Salt