Nina Chambers

First draft

The Salt Rooms

Set in Swansea during the final years of the nineteenth century, the novel follows a clerk’s daughter who takes work cataloguing private letters and household papers for a dying shipping family. What begins as orderly sorting slowly reveals a hidden history of debt, inheritance and a woman who has spent a lifetime being edited out of her own household. The story moves between the practical business of paper and the less practical business of memory, which is usually where trouble starts.