Cold Fish Soup

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

* The Bookseller, Editor’s 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 life’s 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 form’s mechanics … he writes with a suppleness that gifts his stories a winning momentum … [The book] emerges as a gnarly companion piece to Amy Liptrot’s delicate ode to Orkney The Outrun … and Adam Buxton’s Ramble Book … Cold Fish Soup is like nothing else you will read this year: a lyrical and courageous exercise in uncovering one’s own personal history.'

-- Gary Kaill * Lunate magazi