The Salt and the Flame

By (author) Donald S Murray

From the author of the prize-winning As the Women Lay Dreaming comes a poignant and deeply evocative novel of the 20th-century emigrant experience in the New World.

When Finlay and Mairead board the SS Metagama in 1923, leaving the Scottish island of Lewis for Canada, their lives – along with those of the islanders they leave behind – are changed forever. The pair are young, filled with hope, and bound together by a shared past, even as their lives will soon diverge on the other side of the Atlantic.

From Toronto to Detroit, they face the realities of an uncaring industrial society. The effects of the Great Depression are inescapable, and prejudice and division are rife. Fate will bring them back together, but not before they are both transformed. In an adopted country that is tense with both opportunity and loss, social progress and violent backlash, can Mairead and Finlay keep their promises to one another, to look only forward, and resist the constant pull of home?

With lyrical prose and masterful storytelling, Murray paints a vivid portrait of the resilient Hebrideans-in-exile who struggled between holding on and letting go.