MUD PUPPY
Erica Wooff
£10.99
'An exuberant, witty and ingenious novel ... shot through with poignant humour'
Stevie Davies
'I come from a long line of mud. Over seventeen miles of it. For nine years I've tried to shake it off. This year I thought I'd finally succeeded. But not quite. Mud sticks after all'
Daryl Jenkins has come home to Newport, the mud capital of Wales, after nine years of exile in London. Ani, meanwhile, working in the petrol station, is desperate to get away to the lofts and parties of the big city. And the mud puppy? That is a large freshwater newt 3000 miles off track, now magically swimming in the silt of the River Usk and soon, even more miraculously, breathing out of water.
Is the mud puppy a living evolutionary link? Can Daryl return to her element or Ani escape hers? Erica Wooff's debut novel, juxtaposing the normal and surreal to brilliant effect, embraces science, suicide, art neurosis and newts and puts Newport on the literary map.
Erica Wooff
is 35 and comes from Newport. Mud Puppy, her first novel, won an Arts Council of Wales writer's bursary.