Emerging Critics 2020

If Lindsay’s novel was as much a knowing pastiche of the lost girl narrative as a compulsive repetition, the latest addition to the canon, Catherine Noske’s debut novel The Salt Madonna, quickly announces itself as a self-conscious work of genre revision.‘ Once upon a time, a girl called Mary lived on an island called Chesil,’ the framing narrator Hannah Mulvey tells us, before confessing, pages later, that Mary is not her real name.

Fish Song is essayistic in its purpose, returning to questions about human existence in the world, adding and taking away from its answers, shaping and reshaping a response.