Love like salt : a memoir

'Did Clara taste salty when I kissed her? She did. She tasted of mermaids, of the sea.'Love Like Salt is a deeply affecting memoir, beautifully and intelligently written.

It is about mothers and daughters, music and illness, genes and inheritance, writing and story-telling.

It is about creating joy from the hand you've been dealt and following its lead - in this case to rural France, where the author and her family lived for seven years. And back again.'I had always written, and until the birth of Clara I wrote for a living.

Once I knew the Cystic Fibrosis gene had unfolded itself in our daughter's body, like a paper flower meeting water, I felt that to write, even if I had had time, or been able, would have been to squander a kind of power which was needed for tending and nurturing.

Every moment became a moment in which I protected my baby.

Some of it I did in secret, like a madwoman muttering spells.

I thought of her as a candle, cupping my hand around her.