Literary Fiction
The Salt Archive
Elena Marlowe2024
Literary Fiction
The Salt Archive
A cartographer returns to map the island that erased her family — and finds the record has been rewritten.
2024 All books
Historical Fiction
Nightjar
Elena Marlowe2018
Historical Fiction · 2018
Nightjar
In wartime Suffolk, a birdsong recordist is asked to listen for something other than birds.
- Published
- 2018
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Pages
- 288
- Publisher
- Harrowgate Press
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About the book
1943. Constance Peel has spent six years recording birdsong on the Suffolk heaths for a natural history archive that no longer has funding. When a ministry man arrives with better equipment and vague instructions, she understands that her ears have been requisitioned. What follows is a study of complicity conducted at the level of the sentence: a woman who has trained herself to hear everything, learning what it costs to report only some of it. Marlowe's second novel is a taut, unsettling historical work about surveillance, vocation, and the moral weather of a country that has stopped asking questions.
From Chapter Four
The nightjar does not sing so much as run a machine. A dry mechanical churring that rises and falls for minutes at a stretch, and if you have not heard it before you will look for the engine.
Constance had spent four summers learning to sit still enough for it. Now Mr Ledgard sat beside her in the heather with his coat folded under him, and she understood that he was not listening to the bird. He was listening to her listening, and making a note of how good she was at it.
Nightjar · Elena Marlowe
Praise for Nightjar
“A wartime novel with no battles in it, and more tension than most books that have them.”