The Salt Oracle
Published on 6. November 2025
Book
Hardback
416 pages
978-1-83786-574-1 (ISBN)
Description
It's been seventeen years since the internet crashed and left the world broken...
Auli lives on the Bellwether, a floating college safe from the conflict of the mainland, where she studies the Oracle - an uncanny girl who channels dangerous ghosts and provides lost information about the world's seas.
Her peaceful world is shattered when her beloved mentor, Boudain, is found dead. While most aboard believe it was due to natural causes, Auli discovers hints that suggest he was not the benign leader he seemed - and that his death might be deliberate.
Surrounded by people with their own motives and secrets, Auli doesn't know who to trust. Worse, the Oracle is attracting dangerous, mutating ghosts that threaten everyone aboard. With the Bellwether fracturing from internal and external pressures, she is forced to wrestle with a life-changing decision: save the Oracle or save the Bellwether - and all the lives that depend on it.
Auli lives on the Bellwether, a floating college safe from the conflict of the mainland, where she studies the Oracle - an uncanny girl who channels dangerous ghosts and provides lost information about the world's seas.
Her peaceful world is shattered when her beloved mentor, Boudain, is found dead. While most aboard believe it was due to natural causes, Auli discovers hints that suggest he was not the benign leader he seemed - and that his death might be deliberate.
Surrounded by people with their own motives and secrets, Auli doesn't know who to trust. Worse, the Oracle is attracting dangerous, mutating ghosts that threaten everyone aboard. With the Bellwether fracturing from internal and external pressures, she is forced to wrestle with a life-changing decision: save the Oracle or save the Bellwether - and all the lives that depend on it.
Reviews / Votes
"The Salt Oracle is a brilliant story about hope, compassion, ghosts and the sea written with reckless beauty and a finger on the heart." -Stewart Hotston, author of Project Hanuman and Chair of the BSFA "Wilson's The Salt Oracle is an intricate and compelling tale: a dystopian dark academia murder mystery. In a world filled with a fog of infectious ghosts, there is only the salt oracle to divine the way forward - whether she wants to or not. Heart-wrenching and hopeful The Salt Oracle interrogates our humanity, our compassion and our right to remain." - Angela "A.G." Slatter, award-winning author of The Crimson Road "The Salt Oracle blends sci fi, the gothic, and folklore with such skill that I lost myself in its damaged yet hopeful world until the very end. It's a book that isn't afraid of nuance, a story that imagines a world full of ghosts and monsters and confronts how the things that terrify us are made... and asks the question, how can such monsters be unmade? The Salt Oracle is rich and slippery and claustrophobic. It is a book for people who want to see the world differently, who want to lose themselves in the meanings between the lines, and go someplace that feels as strange and dangerous as our world but threaded through with hope." - Angie Spoto, author of The Bone Diver "An intensely heartfelt and poetic tale, The Salt Oracle wraps a crackling mystery in layers of fog and shadow. With echoes of Omelas, Wilson channels Le Guin through the lens of her own deeply-grounded characters and intriguing worldbuilding to ask: in an age of loss, does hope lie in sacrifice or in finding another way to tell stories of the past and future?" - MK Hardy, author of The Needfire "In The Salt Oracle, Lorraine Wilson tips the reader effortlessly into a beautiful and complex story of ghosts and science. There is nobody else writing like this, nobody creating such rich and thoroughly innovative worlds that still feel so eerily credible. It is a thrill to read and lingers long after the final chapter, though unlike the ghosts in its pages this is a haunting I never want to be rid of." - Sam K. Horton, author of Gorse and Ragwort "The Salt Oracle is dark academia done right! Lorraine Wilson's prose is beautiful, her characters complex and flawed. By turns haunting and horrifying, this tale is ultimately humane and hopeful. This is a book that deserves your attention." - Gareth Brown, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Book of Doors "The Salt Oracle is evocative, elegiac, and beautifully stylish. A gorgeous read." - Aliya Whiteley, BSFA Award-Winning author of Three Eight One "The Salt Oracle defies genre boundaries: murder mystery, post-apocalyptic, or dark academia in equal measures, but all of it a gothic tale of the cost of humanity's survival. The story unfolds in fleeting glimpses like the ghosts each character carries with them. Haunting and atmospheric, the questions it poses linger long after the final pages." - Eliza Chan, #1 Sunday Times Bestselling Fantasy Author of Fathomfolk and Tideborn "Gripping, thought-provoking, and gorgeously written, The Salt Oracle is a brilliant portrayal of academia at the edge of a changed and dangerous world. The Bellwether and its inhabitants, and the choices they have to make about what survival means, will stay with me for a long time. It is a novel as haunting as the flickering ghosts within its pages." - Sarah Brooks, author of The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands "In her newest, Wilson blends murder mystery and electric tension with a beautifully realised world and rich, evocative prose. This book is an absolute treat." - Nick Binge, bestselling author of Ascension "Twisty and haunting and hopeful and sad, a beautiful novel dripping ghosts and brine. In the salt and fog the borders we draw between genres are utterly superfluous. A lovely strange wee thing. The prose is delicious and evocative and the elements of dark academia and brooding otherworldly horror are masterfully balanced."-Ian Green, Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominated author of Extremophile "Exquisite." -The FT "Weird, rich and ultimately rewarding." -The GuardianMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Nottingham
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Rebellion Publishing Ltd.
Product notice
With printed dust jacket
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 141 mm
Thickness: 36 mm
Weight
466 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-83786-574-1 (9781837865741)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
A conservation scientist and third culture Scot, Lorraine Wilson lives by the sea writing stories influenced by folklore and the wilderness. She has a PhD from the University of St. Andrews and is the author of This Is Our Undoing, The Way The Light Bends, Mother Sea, We Are All Ghosts in the Forest, and the novella The Last To Drown. Winner of a BFA for her short fiction, her books have been longlisted for the BSFA, finalists for the BFA, Kavya and Saltire Awards, and twice winners of the SCKAwards. Lorraine has been stalked by wolves, caught the bubonic plague, and befriended pythons, but she now sticks to herding cats.