The Salt Eaters

A book full of marvels' New Yorker The American Deep South, in the 1970s. Velma Henry, once a formidable political activist, has grown weary and disillusioned with the fight for civil rights. She wants to end it all. But then she finds herself in the hands of a Black faith community, and the fabled healer Minnie Ransom. As she works through the rage and fear of her traumatic past, Velma finds herself changing, becoming whole and, maybe, free. The Salt Eaters is a boldly optimistic, profound exploration of memory, the self, power and Black health as liberation. 'A hymn to individual courage' The Times Literary Supplement 'Her characters inhabit the nonlinear, sacred space and sacred time of traditional African religion' The New York Times Book Review

Author, activist, filmmaker and academic Toni Cade Bambara was born in Harlem, New York, in 1939. Bambara's award-winning fiction was celebrated during her lifetime for its centring of female characters and its grounding in African-American culture, spaces and dialects; she would later be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. She died in Philadelphia in 1995.