Overview

The novel opens in 1923 as the liner SS Metagama leaves Stornoway harbour, carrying young islanders Mairead and Finlay toward new lives in North America. Over decades, they navigate hope, hardship, prejudice and ambition, their hearts tethered to the island they left behind. What begins as escape becomes a lifelong reckoning with belonging and loss.

Voice & Atmosphere

Murray’s prose is clear and quietly musical, rooted in the rhythms of Hebridean speech and immigrant striving. The tone is elegiac but unsentimental, full of sea wind and distance. His evocation of time and place—Lewis, Canada, the industrial USA—feels both intimate and expansive, carrying the ache of memory in every line.

Characters

Mairead’s determination and pragmatism form the book’s backbone; Finlay’s restless ambition its counterpoint. Their marriage, estrangements and crossings mirror the wider story of migration itself—what is gained, what can’t be kept. The supporting cast, from island kin to North American employers, give the novel texture and quiet humanity.

Themes

The Salt and the Flame examines identity, displacement and endurance. It asks what remains when language, soil and community are stripped away, and whether success abroad can ever fill the space left by home. The title’s elements—salt for the sea, flame for the drive within—speak to the tension between rootedness and renewal.

What Worked

• Authentic sense of place: the landscapes of both Lewis and North America are rendered with care and respect.
• Emotional truth: the migrant experience is shown through quiet, believable lives rather than melodrama.
• Elegantly restrained prose: Murray’s language balances realism with lyric intensity.

Minor Quibbles

• The novel’s broad timeline occasionally compresses events, softening some emotional transitions.
• Secondary characters could have been given more space to breathe within the sweeping narrative.

Final Thoughts

Quietly powerful and steeped in longing, The Salt and the Flame captures the cost of leaving and the resilience it takes to endure. It burns softly but leaves salt on the tongue.

Rating: ★★★★½☆ (4.5/5)