The Salt Man

The adventures and mishaps of a man who makes his living selling salt in Sardinia’s villages.Still a child, a mother sells him to the owner of salt pans on the coast. He becomes the man’s plaything and slave. He grows into a solitary man whose friends are his horse and a fortune teller who has initiated him into manhood and perceives his future.It is the story of a young couple looking forward to a peaceful life and children, but destiny has other plans for them and for a strange woman the wife befriends. Together, they engage in a struggle leading to death and an unwanted child. A story of impossible passions. Their lives unfold against the background of a little-known island of Sardinia, where time is told by the unhurried passing of the seasons and not the frenetic spinning of the hands of a clock, with men and women, the salt of the earth, coping with events beyond their control and comprehension, in an epoch of the past that only recently has become the present.Theirs is a time of war and the ＂collateral damage＂ of women and children deprived of the husbands and fathers. Men who return maimed in body and spirit, bringing with them the tainted seeds of future generations.

About the author Maria Spissu Nilson studied liberal arts in Italy. She taught English in the Italian schools and achieved an M.A. Ed in the United Kingdom. She published her first short stories as an adolescent in magazines published by Mondadori and Rizzoli. For several years she contributed articles on contemporary art to Sardinia’s leading newspaper l’Unione Sarda and in the periodical Informart dealing with the visual arts. For the publisher Curcio she recently published the novel L’uomo sulla sabbia nera. As a visual artist she has exhibited her works in Italy, the United States, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Greece and Argentina. She lives in Sardinia where she was born. Email: msnilson@libero.it