Anbara Salam – författare

Brought to you by PenguinIt is summer, 1956, when fifteen-year-old Bridget first meets Isabella. In their conservative Connecticut town, Isabella is a breath of fresh air. She is worldly, alluring and brazen: an enigma.When they receive an offer to study at the Academy in Italy, Bridget is thrilled. This is her ticket to Europe and - better still - a chance to spend nine whole months with her glamorous and unpredictable best friend.There, lodged in a convent of nuns who have taken a vow of silence, the two girls move towards a passionate but fragile intimacy. As the year rolls on, Bridget grows increasingly fearful that she will lose Isabella''s affections - and the more desperate she gets, the greater the lengths she will go to keep her.Belladonna is a hypnotizing coming-of age story set against the stunning and evocative backdrop of rural Northern Italy. Anbara Salam tells a story of friendship and obsession, desire and betrayal, and the lies we tell in order to belong.© Anbara Salam 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Shortlisted for Fiction Book of the Year at Scotland''s National Book Awards 2024''An exquisitely written work of Caledonian gothic'' Francine Toon, author of Pine''A darkly sparkling jewel of a book'' Kirsty Logan, author of Now She is WitchEdinburgh, 1923.Evelyn Hazard is a young woman living a comfortable and unremarkable middle-class life. One day, her quiet existence is shattered when her steady, reliable husband Robert makes a startling announcement: he can communicate with the dead.As the couple are pulled into the spiritualist movement that emerged following the mass deaths caused by the First World War and the Spanish Flu, Evelyn''s life becomes increasingly unsettled as dark secrets from her past threaten to surface.Faced with the prospect of losing all that is dear to her, Evelyn finds herself asking: is the man she loves a fraud, a madman or - most frighteningly - is he telling the truth?A gothic literary mystery, written in sparkling prose, Hazardous Spirits evokes the spirit of 1920s Edinburgh, in all its bohemian vibrancy.''With the literary lyricism and precise historical detail of a Sarah Waters novel . . . Salam injects a wry humour into this tale of secrets, lies, and the power of the ghosts of our pasts'' Entertainment Weekly''Full of heart and strangeness'' Nell Stevens, author of Briefly, A Delicious Life''A riveting exploration of the unknowable'' Tara Isabella Burton, author of Social Creature

''A gothic tale with a powerful sense of place and an eerie atmosphere''The Sunday Times, Best New Historical Fiction''A heady, entertaining brew...asks questions about guilt, superstition, desire, power, and historical inheritance''Scotland on Sunday

It is 1962, and Marta Khoury, a trail-blazing marine archaeologist, has travelled to Cairnroch, a small island off the east coast of Scotland. An Arctic shipwreck containing the remains of a famous Victorian explorer has been towed back to the island at the behest of his wealthy descendants. Marta''s job is to retrieve valuable artefacts from the vessel, deep beneath the freezing Scottish waters. But on her first dive, she becomes convinced she has seen a ghostly figure lurking in the wreckage.

When Marta discovers objects from the vessel have inexplicably disappeared, she must work to uncover their whereabouts before her boss - who is also her ex-husband - discovers their absence. As a series of unsettling and strange occurrences begins to unfold, Marta''s work trip turns into a long winter as the worst snowstorms of the century sweep in and trap the islanders, and their ghosts, in an icy wilderness.

''With her signature wit and unflinching eye for historical detail Anbara Salam brings a remote Scottish island chillingly to life. The Salvage plumbs the icy depths of memory and colonialism and explores whether love can survive in the frostiest of outposts'' Francine Toon, bestselling author of Pine and Bluff