Nightjar Books
Nightjar, Nightjar
D. Okonkwo
Harrowgate Press
The Salt Almanac
Imogen Rea
jacket drawn by Rowan Street Press — ours is the signed run
Fiction · Hardback · Signed first edition
by Imogen Rea · Harrowgate Press · 384pp
A widow on a shrinking stretch of coast keeps a ledger of the tide — every height, every hour, for forty years. Her daughter finds it after the funeral and reads it the wrong way round, from the last entry back to the first.
It is a novel about the arithmetic people use to survive each other: what gets written down, what gets left out, and how a marriage looks when you can only see its weather. Rea wrote it over nine years in a house she has never once photographed.
Every copy we hold is from the signed first run — Rea sat in the shop on a Tuesday in June and signed until her hand gave out, which was one hundred and twenty books.
Free local delivery over $40 · posted second class the same day if you order before 3pm · collect from the shop within the fortnight.
| Format | Hardback, sewn binding, marked boards |
|---|---|
| Imprint | Harrowgate Press |
| Extent | 384 pages |
| Edition | First edition, first printing — signed on the title page |
| Section | Fiction, front table |
| Reading club | Read here in March — Ruth's notes still behind the till |
I sold my own copy to a customer who wouldn't stop asking about it, then bought it again the same week. A widow catalogues the tide for forty years. Sounds slow. Reader, I missed my stop twice.
Give it to anyone who says nothing happens in literary fiction. Something happens. It happens on page 291 and I had to put the book down and go and stand in the yard.
Marguerite, buyer14 yrs here
Why it's on the shelf
Every title at Foxglove has a person attached to it. Marguerite buys the fiction, and she has been overruled twice in fourteen years — both times by Ruth, both times about endings.
If you buy it and you hate it, tell us. We'd genuinely rather know, and there's a shelf by the door for books that didn't land, at whatever you paid.