Salar the Salmon

Introduction by Michael Morpurgo, illustrations by C.F. Tunnicliffe, pp. 210, Little Toller Books, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-9562545-4-2

Swimming in from cold Atlantic currents in the Atlantic, drawn by a deep impulse to reach ancestral spawning grounds inland, Salar – the 'leaper' – is a five-year-old male salmon returning to the stream of its birth. Salar's migration through the riverways of Devon, surviving porpoises, seals, nets, fishermen, otters, poachers and weirs, is one of nature's great journeys. Intense, brilliantly imagined, the salmon's perilous return leaves us with a vivid, unsentimental picture of how both people and wildlife rely on a river and its estuary.

Originally published in 1935, Salar the Salmon combines Henry Williamson's great talent as a writer with his insight as a naturalist. This new edition includes C.F. Tunnicliffe's black and white illustrations that first appeared in 1936, and features a specially commissioned jacket cover by Mark Hearld.

'It is a rare gift indeed for a storyteller to be poet as much as a storyteller, to tell a tale so deeply engaging that the reader wants to know what will happen and never want it to end, and yet at the same time tells it in such a way as to leave a reader wide-eyed with amazement at the sheer intensity of feeling that can be induced by the word-magic of a poet. Henry Williamson is just such a story-maker poet.' – MICHAEL MORPURGO