Cold Fish Soup

Cold Fish Soup is a memoir in essays about life and death in a crumbling, forgotten Yorkshire seaside town, and how people can find sanctuary and curious tales in the most unexpected places.

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

‘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.’

''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.''

''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.''

''A truly wonderful and ingenious writer … funny, warm.''

''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''.''

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

''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.''

''[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.''

''A nuanced, well-structured and memorable memoir; it deservedly won the Northbound Book Award.''

“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 

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, he’d 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 didn’t anticipate how much he’d 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 inhabitants—and 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.

• | Author: Adam Farrer
• | Publisher: Saraband
• | Publication Date: Aug 04, 2022
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781913393465
• | ISBN-10: 1913393461