Cold Fish Soup

(Paperback)

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Echoing the canny writing of David Sedaris, Farrer has a knack for wringing hilarity from lifes grim moments this meditation on the beauty of impermanence charms.Publishers Weekly

Cold Fish Soup is a series of meditations, often humorous, about life and death in a crumbling, forgotten English seaside town, and how people can find sanctuary and curious tales in the most unexpected places.

Before teenager Adam Farrer relocated with his family to Withernsea in 1992, hed never heard of this isolated, faded seaside town in a down-trodden part of Yorkshire, northern England. The move represented just one thing to him: a chance to leave the insecurities of adolescence behind. He could do that anywhere. But he didnt anticipate how much hed grow to love the quirks of the town, nor care about its eroding cliffs and declining high street.

Cold Fish Soup is an affectionate look at a place and its inhabitantsand the ways in which they can shape and influence someone throughout their life. Drawing on his own experience, Adam shares stories from adolescence to adulthood of reinvention, male mental health and suicide, friendship, interdimensional werewolves, burlesque dancing pensioners, and his compulsion toward the sea.

In this personal, insightful, and funny account, Adam explores the power of community and what it means to love and be shaped by a place that is running out of time.

Reviews

'Vividly documents the minutiae of small-town life on the margins captures it beautifully.'

* The Bookseller, Editors Choice *

In a book as laced with humanity as it is with the presence of the North Sea, Adam Farrer asks that you fall in love with the overlooked, with that which is crumbling and destined to be lost to the sea. I fell for it hard.

* Wyl Menmuir, Booker-listed author of The Draw of the Sea *

'Cold Fish Soup is such a wide-ranging and thought-provoking essay collection, covering masculinity, mental health, werewolves and alien sightings, sense of belonging, the difficulties of carving out a creative life in a geographically marginalised place, coastal erosion and burlesque, amongst other things. It drew me in, and kept me hooked, through all diversions and detours in time and narrative, and made me both cry and laugh heartily and fully. It is a love letter to Withernsea and all the people in it, its crumbling cliffs, its strange beauties and its losses, that made me love Withernsea too.'

* Polly Atkin *

'Cold Fish Soup understands the oddity, tenderness and brutal ordinariness of small town life. Adam Farrer is a bold new voice in nonfiction writing. His keen observations are as gentle as they are wry, as attentive to the bleak truths of loss and deprivation as they are to the eccentric humour of humans being entirely themselves ... Witty, charming, moving and real.'

* Jenn Ashworth *

'What a glorious book! Just beautiful. Adam dances down that line between happy and sad with such sure-footed grace. It underlines that there is no such thing as 'an ordinary life' or indeed an 'ordinary place'.'

* Catherine Simpson *

'Witty, moving, wry, insightful and caring in how it deals with its subject matter.'

* The Bookseller, Category Highlight, annual preview *

'Witty and introspective moving elegiac vivid evocations of the landscape Echoing the canny writing of David Sedaris, Farrer has a knack for wringing hilarity from lifes grim moments this meditation on the beauty of impermanence charms.'

* Publishers Weekly *

'[Farrer] documents his own personal history with guile and candour, but it is the tenderness with which he introduces his family that enriches the reading experience Farrer has an uncanny grasp of his chosen forms mechanics he writes with a suppleness that gifts his stories a winning momentum [The book] emerges as a gnarly companion piece to Amy Liptrots delicate ode to Orkney The Outrun and Adam Buxtons Ramble Book Cold Fish Soup is like nothing else you will read this year: a lyrical and courageous exercise in uncovering ones own personal history.'

-- Gary Kaill * Lunate magazine *

Author Bio

Adam Farrer is an award-winning writer, a teacher of creative nonfiction and an editor.Cold Fish Soup,his first book, won the NorthBound Book Award in 2021, and his work has been published in anthologies, journals and newspapers.He edits the creative nonfiction journalThe Real Story, as well as lecturing in creative nonfiction writing and teaching workshops.He has performed at literary festivals and spoken word events including the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Manchester Literature Festival and the Northern Lights Writers Conference.