How Saints Die

LoveReading Says

Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2018

Gosh, this is provocative, powerful, and actually rather beautiful, I will admit to being completely bewitched. Ellie Fleck is ten years old, she lives with her father Peter on the North Yorkshire coast, her mother no longer lives with them. We spend time with Ellie, and the people around her, as she tries to understand what has happened.  Ellie’s words sing with intensity, a child’s words, spilling on to the page, yet they seared their way onto my soul, and remain there.

She describes sounds, I tested them myself, hearing, seeing, feeling, right in the centre of my stomach. She views the unseen, hears what isn’t audible, tests herself and those she loves as she reaches for comprehension. Carmen Marcus has the lightest, yet hard-hitting touch, I have fallen completely under the spell of her writing.

‘How Saints Die’ made me feel, I felt every word, every sentence, and I highly recommend meeting, and getting to know Ellie Fleck. ~ Liz Robinson

LoveReading

About How Saints Die

'What a glorious, beautiful sea-shanty of a book this is. A fairy tale of wild, sea-swept children and wolfish fear. Written in a compelling, rushing language.' Daisy Johnson, author of the Man Booker-longlisted Everything UnderEllie Fleck has a question for everything, except the one she cannot ask.Where have they taken her mother?Ten years old and irrepressibly curious, Ellie lives with her fisherman father, Peter, on the wild North Yorkshire coast. It's the 1980s and her mother's breakdown is discussed only in whispers, with the promise 'better by Christmas' and no further explanation.Steering by the light of her dad's sea-myths, her mum's memories of home across the water, and a fierce spirit all her own, Ellie begins to learn - in these sudden, strange circumstances - who she is and what she can become. By the time the first snowdrops show, her innocence has been shed, but at great cost.

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