How Saints Die by Carmen Marcus

Ellie is ten years old. She learns five new words a week and knows that stories can keep you from drowning. She doesn’t know where they have taken her mother, what ECT stands for, or how to keep her father safe. Her next door neighbour warns her fisherman father that the child is wild. Ellie knows about wildness.

Carmen Marcus’ debut novel How Saints Die is a soaring success; beautiful and devastating. It is a simple story seen through the eyes of a young girl with a vivid imagination, trying to make sense of her mother’s absence and incomprehensible, easily-breakable social rules. In graceful prose, Marcus sketches an image of the North Yorkshire coast then adds the snap of the cold wind, the sting of sea spray, the hotness of welling tears.

The book is stunningly evocative – of a time, of a place, of childhood, and of what it means not to fit in. As Ellie ‘flicks open her penknife to slice a limpet off the rock, suck and pop,’ so Marcus exposes what lies beneath – human cruelty and kindnesses, foibles, frailties and strengths. Ellie is observant; as a child she understands sometimes less and sometimes more: ‘She keeps her prayers precise; they are not wishes.’

Within Ellie’s world of gutting fish and playing dead and weaving noughts in nets, life is harsh and stories are powerful. This book is beautiful, from cover to core.