📖 Publication Day Book Review ~ The Foreshore by Samantha York

Salt Publishing
4 August 2025

Thanks to the publisher for the invitation to review this book

In the wake of a deadly storm, past sins return to haunt the living…

Eilean Eòin is a tiny scrap of land which is stranded amidst miles of fierce ocean, where the scant population barely cling to a centuries’ old way of life. It is here that Flora McKinnon, an aging islander, is brought news of her youngest child’s death, whilst tensions are riled by the arrival of a new reverend, Thomas Murray. Murray has a mission: to weed out religious dissent and purge the island in the name of progress.

When a strange young woman is found washed up on the foreshore, illness and famine start to blight the island, stirring whispers of witchcraft. Despite their differences, Flora and Murray unite in an uneasy attempt to solve the mystery of the girl’s identity, which soon becomes an all-consuming obsession. With their own deep-buried skeletons, will the island's dark secrets make or break them both?

📖My Review..

When Reverend Thomas Murray arrives on the tiny Scottish island of Eilean Eòin he is confronted by a group of mistrustful group of islanders who don’t take kindly to religious strangers nor do they like any interference in how they should run their lives. With a bad harvest and food in short supply the  men of the island must do whatever they can in order to provide for their families. However illness and hunger are never far away so when a young woman is found washed up on the foreshore, there starts the whispers of her being a witch and the cause of all their misery and misfortune.

Bleak and beautiful in equal measure, The Foreshore is a darkly claustrophobic story of a tiny place which is deeply troubled. The islanders are a wary lot, suspicious of each other and yet they are bound together by their history and shared secrets. Parts of the story are slow and considered, whilst others are viscerally affecting, especially the outpouring of blame which is caught up with feelings of guilt and isolation. Quite stunning in its description of island life, about how gut wrenchingly hard were their lives as they eked out a meagre existence, survival dependent on what foods they could forage from cliff edges.

 The Foreshore is a powerful story, beautifully told, and one that will stay with me for a long time.

About the Author

amantha York is a writer and advocate for young people with additional support needs. She grew up by the sea in Northumberland before moving to Scotland to complete her master's degree in literature and history. She now lives in Glasgow.

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