SALT

SALT
A novel about care that clings like sea air - and when looking after someone becomes a claim on their life.

In a damp coastal apartment, a woman tends to a person who needs more and more of her. Towels are washed and rehung, bowls collect keys and small obligations, voicemail messages arrive from someone who insists she is "overdoing it" while still relying on her routines. Salt gathers on the window glass, in laundry, on skin - a thin, recurring crust that returns no matter how often she scrapes it away. Care, at first a series of mundane acts, slowly hardens into a structure that dictates where she can go, when she can sleep and who she is allowed to be.

SALT moves through entryways, kitchens, bathrooms, stairwells and ferry terminals, tracing how a household turns into a tide pool: small, contained, constantly refilling with the same water. The city presses in via neighbours, regulations and the ever-present possibility of leaving - a moving box taped with a white X, a ticket not yet bought. The novel asks, with tidal persistence: when does care become ownership, and when does protection quietly start to drown the very person it is meant to keep afloat?

Spiritually, SALT is aligned with the Odù Òdí in Yoruba Ifá lore and the vast, tidal pull of Yemọja, Òrìṣà of sea, motherhood and overwhelming care. Àsẹ is experienced here as the force that binds and overflows: the Odù's contraction and containment echo in the apartment's walls, even as the sea outside keeps insisting on change.

Perfect for readers who appreciate:
• The intimate, wave-like interiority of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Strout, or Rachel Cusk
• Domestic fiction that understands homes as ecosystems under strain
• Stories about caregiving, illness and boundary-setting without easy villains
• Coastal atmospheres where weather, architecture and emotion mirror each other

SALT is Book 04 of THE ÀṢẸ PORTRAITS - a stand-alone novel about how love turns into infrastructure, and how hard it is to open a window once the salt has set.