Jacob, who destroys what he loves with the rapacity of his desire, is as compelling as he is appalling…Most impressively, the writing here is flawless.

Maria McCann and her irresistible narration and beautifully rendered characters made AMLS a full package.As Meat Loves Salt" is the tormented and at times picaresque story of Jacob Cullen, one of three brothers once of some substance but now reduced to serving in a minor aristocratic household. Maria McCann was born in Liverpool in 1956 and spent most of her childhood there devouring novels at every opportunity. It was obviously written under a rare conjunction of the planets, because it has a magic that McCann’s second novel, The Wilding, was unable to repeat. It’s the themes, the dark part of “darkly erotic”, that might require an elevation to mature; the things depicted, not the depictions, which are way less explicit than, say, my own Darksiders fic.

no, i suppose this isn't a gentle book, but it is wonderfully written, and there is some true love in it, it's just not rodanthe love. Such a picture would be so perfectly representative of AMLS that I didn’t think it at all unlikely the cover artist painted a period piece after reading the book.

This book does that; it’s not to say that there isn’t superb period detail in there, there is, but it’s only brought out when it’s necessary. Eaton has an article on rough heroes (I have a number of problems with the article but that's irrelevant), and I . Thanks Erik – the date thing was to do with the letter, I can’t remember off the top of my head – the book’s upstairs and it’s a long time since I read it – but it was the letter that I remember, that seemed important. AMLS is dark, passionate, heartbreaking, painful and completely draining in that kind of delightful way only certain novels can be.

Essentially, Jacob burns with religous ferver at a time when religious differences were so important (and had long been! The beginning of the book is a bit hard to get into because one of the main characters appears to be such a dreadful person that it takes a bit of reading to appreciate it. Furthermore, before I learned what the picture is, and seeing only a part of it in the cover, I thought the man’s eyes were open, if ever so slightly.The main character is filled with remorse but who knows if it is genuine or only because he has lost something that he desired? As Meat Loves Salt is a book that will make you shout out loud and then weep alone in your apartment. all of that fit hand-in-glove with his less attractive qualities - condescension and high-handedness, a transparent sort of trickiness, a tendency to overindulge in alcohol, an optimism that veers into thoughtlessness and, finally, a willful blindness to reality. I even wondered whether Maria McCann left things somewhat vague at the end perhaps having in mind the possibility of writing a sequel?