‘The events of The Honours changed her. Time has changed her. So how can you have that continuity while ensuring she’s not this static pastiche of the original character? It took a lot of ink, a lot of scenes which didn’t make it to the final draft, and a lot of listening and reflecting to really find her voice.’ Tim Clare reflects on his protagonist’s changes leading into The Ice House in an interview with the Qwillery.

“She wins you over immediately with an irresistible combination of warmth, honesty, deep understanding of cooking and that ebullient laugh of hers. If anyone can show us how to cook, it is Samin.”

Alice Waters has written about Samin Nosrat and the wonders of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat for Time’s list of their 100 most influential people.

“These isolated, precarious refuges, at once exposed and welcoming, allow Richards to interrogate ideas of home and escape, of safety and adventure, all in a narrative whose principal pleasure is the time the reader gets to spend in the author’s amiable, erudite, Tiggerish company … Richards is often compared to his friend Rober Macfarlane, but his voice is much closer to that of Geoff Dyer: vivid, self-deprecating, literary and very, very funny.”

“Sitting static, miles from the sea, reading Runcie’s account of childbirth during one of my son’s post-lunch naps had me in tears. It was as visceral and as heroic as any Homeric epic. I may not know Runcie, not live on a coast, have nothing fishy in my background, but hearing her story of pain and broken waters made me feel true affinity. I felt, as she describes in relation to the lives of fishermen’s wives, like a woman standing on the shore, looking at the drama unfolding far out at sea. I felt like someone with salt on my face and air in my lungs; a piece of something greater and more magnificent, enacted by women everywhere.”

“Because this, after all, is what fiction is supposed to do. For the few hours or days or weeks that we are held by a book, it should lead us towards other places and other lives. It should un-centre us, and reorient our imaginations.” A brilliant essay by Malachy Tallack (author of The Valley at the Centre of the World) on how fiction can force us to reconsider ‘remoteness’.

“This is a very fine novel indeed … Anybody who seeks to understand the world as it is today will find enlightenment here.”