Salt / Alva Thomas.

Local author.

Although the characters and some of the places, for obvious reasons, are fictional, this book is historically, geographically, and ecologically accurate. Art, the Georgia coast, wealth, ambition, racial disparity, asymmetric love, strong women, death, grief, and neurosis are some of the elements of this composition. It is a novella of approximately 33,300 words. Above everything else, Salt is a story. It is a story that can inform readers about the past or bathe them in nostalgia. It will entertain readers and challenge their emotions. It will make them question just how far we've moved forward since 1965. Salt is the story of Salton St. Claire, son of an ambitious electrical worker and a Romani woman who dreamed of being an artist. When his mother died in childbirth, her older sister took over Salt's upbringing with the same love of family and art. By the time he was an adult, Salt was an extremely educated man in both art and electrical engineering. But art was his passion. The story moves the protagonist from Chicago through Pearl Harbor and Providence, RI, to the barrier islands and marshes of coastal Georgia where tragedy trumped his life of wealth and privilege. In his grief, he felt his only escape was through his art and the barely inhabited islands he had been drawn to for years. The story spans from 1909 through 1965 as the man struggles to save himself from his own desire to save others, triggered by a loss he had no control over, on his way to becoming the world's most legendary painter.