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Elena Marsh is the author of the Harrow Coast trilogy — The Salt Almanac, A Map of Low Tides and The Drowned Bell — and the standalone novel The Glasshouse Winter. Her books have been translated into nineteen languages and have sold more than half a million copies. A former maritime archivist, she lives on the north-east coast.
Elena Marsh grew up in a harbour town on the north-east coast, in a house where the tide tables hung beside the kitchen calendar. She studied history and spent eleven years as an archivist at a maritime museum, cataloguing ships’ logs, lighthouse registers and the parish records of villages lost to the sea.
A box of letters written by a lighthouse keeper’s daughter became the seed of her first novel, The Salt Almanac, which won the Coastline Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Aldermoor First Novel Award. It began the Harrow Coast trilogy, continued in A Map of Low Tides and completed in The Drowned Bell: a family saga spanning three generations and forty-two years on one fictional stretch of coast. The trilogy has been translated into nineteen languages, has sold more than half a million copies and is in development for television.
Her fourth novel, The Glasshouse Winter, is a standalone story of grief, obsession and survival set during the great freeze.
Elena teaches an annual course on writing place and weather, is a patron of the Coastal Libraries Trust and writes a monthly newsletter, Letters from the Coast. She lives in a converted net loft with her partner, a lurcher called Pilot and far too many notebooks.
High-resolution files for print and screen. Please show covers whole, without cropping or added text, and credit photographs as listed.
Front cover · JPG · 3000 × 4500 px · 4.8 MB
Download The Glasshouse Winter coverColour and mono · JPG · 3600 × 4500 px · Credit: Juno Farrow
Download the author portraitEndpaper illustration · PNG · 4000 × 3200 px · 5.1 MB
Download the Harrow Coast mapEvery file above in one folder, with a text file of captions and credits.
Download all · ZIP · 38 MBElena spoke to The Northgate Review before The Glasshouse Winter was published. The interview may be reproduced in full or in part with credit. It has been edited for length.
It’s stitched together from about six real places. The lighthouse is from one headland, the harbour from another, and the drowned village is a composite of three I found in parish records while I was still an archivist. I wanted a coast I was allowed to flood. You can’t do that to a real town without somebody’s grandmother writing to complain.
It taught me that the interesting part of any record is the gap. A lighthouse log will tell you the wind, the visibility and the hours the lamp was lit, and then one night there’s a line missing and a different hand the next morning. Every one of my books starts in a gap like that.
Every archive is a list of what someone decided was worth keeping. So is every novel.
Elena Marsh
Because on the coast it is one. My grandfather could read the next day in the colour of the evening, and people there still plan their lives around it. Weather is also the one thing every reader shares. You may never have kept a lighthouse, but you have stood in rain that changed your mind about something.
Harder than I expected. I spent ten years with them. But I’d finished what I wanted to say about the sea, and I wanted to write about the opposite problem: not water coming in, but cold keeping everything still. A glasshouse in a frozen winter is a lighthouse turned inside out. The light is all inside.
Blue notebook, fountain pen, a thousand words before noon, then a long walk with the dog whatever the weather. Afternoons are for typing up and cutting. I read everything aloud before anyone sees it, which is why the neighbours think I talk to myself.
A novel about a travelling library in the nineteen-fifties. It’s set inland, which feels very daring.
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