Saltglass
In a city half under the sea, a glassblower’s apprentice learns her glass can hold back water. It cannot hold it back for long.
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About this book
The city of Vell was built on the shore and is slowly returning to the sea. Its glassmakers blow saltglass from the sand of the drowned streets, and nobody has ever asked why it never breaks. Pell Arroway is sixteen, three years into her apprenticeship and tired of making fishing floats, when she blows a window that the tide will not touch. A fantasy about craft, heat, stubborn people and a city deciding whether it is worth saving.
In Vell the sea came in a little further every year, and every year the city stepped back from it, building new streets on the roofs of the old ones. At low tide you could look down through the green water of the harbour and see doorways, and steps, and the tops of lamp posts that nobody alive had ever seen lit. Pell Arroway had blown four thousand fishing floats in three years. She knew because she had counted, carving a mark on the furnace wall for every hundred. Round green floats, the colour
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About the author
Arlo Quinn
I fix bikes at a little shop in West End, a block back from the river, and I write before work, from about five until the humidity wins. Most of my stories start with something broken and a person stubborn enough to fix it: a relay station on a dead moon, a glass furnace in a flooded city, a bush town where the iron has started to walk. I grew up in Ipswich, read every paperback in the Redbank Plains library by the time I was fourteen, and still think the best crews are the ones that argue about lunch. I share a Queenslander with two housemates, a lot of tools and a possum who lives in the roof and does not pay rent.
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