Quiren Press

The SaltYear

Iris Halloran

Out now in hardback

The Salt Year

A woman returns to the drowned village where she grew up, to catalogue what the water took — and finds the record does not agree with her memory.

4.6 from 1,284 readers

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Praise

Halloran writes water better than anyone since Shirley Hazzard. I finished it on a train and could not speak to anyone for an hour.
Maeve Corrigan — The Observer

A novel about the unreliability of the archive, and about what a village owes the people it drowned. Extraordinary, and quietly furious.
The Times Literary Supplement

I have read the first chapter four times now, looking for the trick. There isn't one. She simply writes like that.
Daniel Okonjo — author of Fieldwork

The best English novel about memory and landscape in a decade. It will be taught.
The Guardian — Book of the Month

The story

In the winter of 1962 the valley at Ardnashee was flooded to make a reservoir, and eleven houses, a chapel and a school went under. Everyone was moved to the new terraces on the ridge. Everyone agreed it was for the best.

Sixty years later Nell Garrahan comes back as an archivist, commissioned to catalogue the parish records before the diocese closes. She has not been to Ardnashee since she was nine. The papers are in poor condition and largely intact — and almost none of what they record matches what she remembers being told, by her mother, about the year the water came.

The Salt Year is a novel about the difference between a record and a memory, and about how a community decides which of the two it is going to live by.

The opening

The Salt YearChapter One

One

The Water Board

The road down to Ardnashee ended in water, and had done for sixty years, but the county had never taken the sign away. Nell parked where the tarmac gave out and sat with the engine ticking, reading it. Ardnashee 2 km. Below the lettering somebody had added, in paint that had outlasted the council's, a single word she could no longer read.

It was the last week of February and the reservoir was low. That was the thing nobody had mentioned on the phone — that after the dry autumn the water had drawn back off the western shore and left forty metres of grey silt, and in the silt, if you knew where to look, the footings of the chapel.

She had known where to look before she got out of the car.

Her mother had described it perhaps a hundred times, always the same way, always in the same order: the chapel, then the schoolhouse behind it, then the row of eleven cottages running down to what had been the river. A litany. Nell had been able to recite it at nine years old and could still recite it now, and standing on the shore with the wind coming up the valley she found that every part of it was wrong.

3

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Editions

Hardback

£18.99

First edition, sewn binding
328 pages, 216 × 135 mm
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Published October 2026
B-format, 328 pages

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Read by Siobhán Ferrar
9 hours 42 minutes

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The author

Iris Halloran

Iris Halloran was born in Sligo in 1979 and worked for eleven years as a records archivist before publishing anything. Her first novel, Cold Store, won the Rooney Prize; her second, The Fetch, was longlisted for the Booker.

The Salt Year is her third novel, and the first she has set in a place she can actually remember.

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