Salt & Smoke

She was running from an anniversary. He was watching a man he'd spent eighteen months hunting. Then the yacht exploded, the Mediterranean swallowed the night, and they found each other in the dark — two strangers with nothing left but a two-kilometre swim and a sliver of uninhabited island on the horizon. Mara Voss is a chef who closed her acclaimed restaurant to survive her grief. Eli is a government operative who doesn't give his last name, carries a gun in his jacket, and knows things about her father that will change everything she thought she understood about her own life. On a stone island with a lemon tree, a rusted stove, and eighteen days before the coast guard finds them, they build something out of nothing — as chefs and spies and desperate people do. But the island ends. The world reassembles its complications. And what they've made in the salt air and the smoke of the cooking fire will have to survive contact with all of it: a father's crimes, a partner's ghost, the slow rebuild of two people who have forgotten, until now, what it means to be glad. Read more