The Salt Of The Earth

A mesmerising homage to literature, reading, and the work of telling stories.

The narrator of this story is playing a soccer game when he hops over a fence and takes off along an airport runway, just as a plane is about to land. It happens in summertime, as he’s approaching adolescence, and his friends cheer him on as he desperately chases a ball that the east wind wants to steal from him. Long after that frantic incident that will change their lives, when the facts seem to be already neatly folded and stored away in their distant memories, the narrator gets an unexpected, and unnerving, message. Simón, one of his best friends back in the day, who he hasn’t heard from in more than twenty-five years, sends him an email with a proposal: Why don’t you write about us? In a later message Simón regrets his request. From that moment on, the narrator, compelled by his obsession with finding the seed of his next book, insists on tracking down Simón and finding out why he no longer wants him to write their story.