Salar the Salmon is the book alongside Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter that remains embedded in my childhood memory. Yes I was brought up in Devon and Salar the Salmon is set there but it's much more than the river I knew. This is the story of a salmon and the epic cycle of survival that is the life of a salmon. It's utterly gripping and completely timeless. A classic for every child and adult to read. This recent edition comes complete with the most beautiful black and white illustrations that first appeared in a 1936 edition of this title.
A message about Salar the Salmon from Michael Morpurgo:
'It is a rare gift indeed for a storyteller to be a poet as much as a storymaker, to tell a tale so deeply engaging that the reader wants to know what will happen and never wants it to end, and yet at the same tells it in such a way as to leave a reader wide-eyed with amazement at the sheer intensity of feeling that can be induced by the word-magic of a poet. Henry Williamson is just such a story-maker poet.'
Salar the Salmon’s migration through the rivers of Devon – surviving porpoises, seals, nets, fishermen, otters, poachers and weirs – is one of nature’s great journeys. Intense, brilliantly imagined, the salmon’s perilous return leaves the reader with a vivid, unsentimental picture of how both people and wildlife rely on a river and its estuary.
This new edition includes the black and white illustrations by C.F. Tunnicliffe that first appeared in 1936.
Henry Williamson was born in Brockley, south-east London. After leaving school he enlisted in the London Rifle Brigade and served as a private in the Flanders trenches, where he was present for the Christmas Truce of 1914. His experiences of the First World War continued to surface in his writing, most notably in the semi-autobiographical series of books A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951-1969). He moved to north Devon in 1921, where, inspired by the books of Richard Jefferies, Williamson started writing lyrical essays and stories about wildlife, which included his two most popular and critically acclaimed creations: Tarka the Otter (1927) and Salar the Salmon (1935). He was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1928, and with the £100 prize money bought a field and built himself a hut, where Salar was written.
