Cold Fish Soup – a review

I read Cold Fish Soup in two days.

It’s certainly a memoir but its shifting non-fiction boundaries and categories reflect the rapidly eroding coastline that provides its backdrop.

It reads and feels like a book Adam Farrer had to write.

It’s part travelogue, part local history, part family memoir with lots of observation and description of the changing landscape of the Yorkshire coast.

Disappearing landmarks provide a fascinating hook for me. Most of us take for granted the churches, roads and houses of our neighbourhoods but those living in Withernsea and along the east Yorkshire coast find themselves calculating the rate at which land will be lost to the North Sea.

Roads end abruptly and houses and caravans have spilled over the edge into sloppy, muddy shoreline. In one section of the book Adam interviews a woman living perilously close to the edge as workmen erect a fence warning of the drop. Later, she calls to say the fence has now gone over too ‘making the rate of erosion now faster than I can type.’ The waves get closer to Adam’s family’s house each year.

With climate change these are issues we are increasingly going to have to tackle, yet this coast is already at the sharp end.

Adam captures a lot of the joy and nostalgia and pleasures of seaside towns – fish and chips, piers, windswept walks and the escapism of being out there at the edge of the world. He also deals, of course, with the loneliness, the poverty, the lack of employment and investment and the broken lives including tragedies in his own family.

 What shone through for me was the incredible, always shifting landscape and the characters featured in the book. Perhaps it’s the uncertainty that drives people on and I enjoyed reading about Adam’s mother’s burlesque dancing group, his own musical and sartorial adolescent experiments, the poet and pebble collector Dean Wilson (check him out on X), the UFO researchers, Adam’s rescue dog Millie.

The bus shelter at Hull station bears the scrawled message ‘God Hates Withernsea’ but Adam clearly doesn’t. He’s drawn back there.

I really enjoyed this book and would recommend. I look forward to reading more of Adam’s writing.

Thanks to Garrie Fletcher for recommending and my wife for buying!