Cold Fish Soup
By Adam Farrer

I have a non-fiction book for my blog tour spot today of which I am closing the tour with the award winning book – Cold Fish Soup. It’s consuming and will take readers to the sea and discovery of the author. Thanks to Random T. Tours for the invite to review and to Adam Farrer for the book, bookmark and stick of rock.

Blurb

WINNER OF THE 2021 NORTHBOUND BOOK AWARD

‘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

Before Adam Farrer’s family relocated to Withernsea in 1992, he’d never heard of the Holderness coast. The move represented one thing to Adam: a chance to leave the insecurities of early adolescence behind. And he could do that anywhere. What he didn’t know was how much he’d grow to love the quirks and people of this faded Yorkshire resort, in spite of its dilapidated attractions and retreating clifftops.

While Adam documents the minutiae of small-town life, he lays bare experiences that are universal. His insights on family, friendship, male mental health and suicide are revealed in stories of reinvention, rapacious seagulls, interdimensional werewolves, burlesque dancing pensioners, and his compulsion towards the sea.

Cold Fish Soup is an affectionate look at a place and its inhabitants, and the ways in which they can shape and influence someone, especially of an impressionable age. Adam’s account explores what it means to love and be shaped by a place that is under threat, and the hope – and hilarity – that can be found in community.

Review

Cold Fish Soup begins with a map of The Holderness, Witherness. I received this book on a rather hot summers day and holiday time was upon me and very timely, it came with a very delicious stick of rock (now long gone and enjoyed).

So, what of the book? It’ll make your body tense a bit and shudder and perish the thought of what could have happened in the beginning and it is very well-written. It can’t not catch readers attention. It’s atmospheric and emotional and will more than touch the sides of your very being.

Adam Farrer is candid in what is indeed bold writing as he takes readers through changing times in his life as it becomes more challenging and more melancholy than ever before; and for a guy who really enjoyed food, this all changed. Adam is candid when it comes to his mental health and also his friends and family.

There is some humour that smooths the book out from the shattering beginning and mellows it a bit, from the sharpness. The humour and sharpness of life plays great contrast together and then another element comes in of the boldness of the seascapes and the vulnerability of the coastlines and the properties lining them. It all flows and interweaves somewhat poetically in its cleverness and draws you further inwards.

Adam then moves to as was acutely aware of his mental health and the anxieties he had developed and were never too far away and nor is the sea, he initially talks about.

The book dances between the happy and sad as people get to know more about Adam, Witherness and the quirks of a place and of its residents and of life.