As Meat Loves Salt, Maria McCann's first novel, came out in February 2001. "A darkly erotic tale of passion and obsession, order and chaos... a shattering portrait of a maddened man", says the cover blurb, and for once we can guarantee it; some of us who workshopped the drafts haven't got over it yet. It's set during the English Civil War, in a world turning upside down and hungry for change; its world is totally convincing and the story grips from first to last. Unmissable.

Few novels in a reader's year live in the mind as this one does. The story is driven by guilt, desire and a sense of sin. It is beautifully written, spare, with moments of poetry. Surely flesh has never been described with such a combination of pathology and beauty.

Gillian Clarke

As Meat Loves Salt was published by HarperCollins Flamingo on 19 February, at �14.99 (hbk). There was a feature in Vogue, in March, on Maria and 5 other new novelists.

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