The Salt Houses
A widow returns to the coastal town that raised her.
2024 · Riverhead
Find a copy →Novelist & Essayist
Adeline Marsh
Quiet novels about the rooms we live inside and the weather we learn to read.
The new novel
The Salt Houses
2024 · Riverhead · A National Book Award longlist selection
When a widow returns to the fishing town that raised her, she finds the tide has taken more than the shoreline. Told across four winters, The Salt Houses is a novel about inheritance, forgiveness, and the long labor of coming home.
The shelf
Selected books
A Country of Small Rooms
Fourteen essays on solitude, work, and the rooms we live inside.
2021 · Riverhead
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The Winter Tenants
Three families, one boarding house, one long thaw.
2018 · Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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Bright Passage
A lighthouse keeper's daughter learns to read the weather.
2014 · Graywolf Press · Debut
Find a copy →From the page
The house had learned to live without her, the way a coat keeps the shape of the person who last wore it, then slowly, over a season of hanging, forgets.
She had not meant to stay past the funeral. But the salt got into everything here — the hinges, the bread, the small talk at the harbor — and by the second week she found herself buying a broom, then a kettle, then, without deciding to, a future.
— The Salt Houses, chapter one
About the author
Adeline Marsh is the author of three novels and a collection of essays. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Harper's, and has been translated into eleven languages. She writes slowly and by hand, keeps a lighthouse-keeper's log of the weather, and is drawn again and again to coastal towns, boarding houses, and the ordinary rooms where ordinary people quietly change.
A former bookseller, she taught fiction for a decade before writing full time. Her debut, Bright Passage, won the Graywolf Prize; her latest, The Salt Houses, was longlisted for the National Book Award. She lives on the coast of Maine with her partner, a retired ferry captain, and two indifferent cats.
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Praise
Marsh writes sentences you want to underline and then read aloud to someone you love.
— The Paris Review
A novelist of rare patience. She trusts the reader completely, and the reward is total.
— The New Yorker
The Salt Houses confirms Marsh as one of our finest chroniclers of ordinary grief.
— The New York Times Book Review
On tour
Readings & events
- Oct 3
Community Bookstore — Brooklyn, NY
In conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri · 7:00 PM
- Oct 18
Powell's City of Books — Portland, OR
Reading & signing · 6:30 PM
- Nov 9
Parnassus Books — Nashville, TN
The Salt Houses tour · 7:00 PM
- Nov 22
Shakespeare and Company — Paris
Evening reading · 19h00
The margins
A letter, now and then
A few times a year I write to readers about what I'm reading, where I'll be, and the occasional cut passage that didn't make the book. No noise, no schedule — just a letter.
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