The Herring Girl's Lucky Knife
A Novel

About this book:

On the rolling deck of a North Sea trawler in 1974, Catriona MacLeod guts herring with a knife that has fed generations of women—but tonight, the blade does something impossible. Where steel meets silver flesh, the fish don't bleed. They turn to gold.

As the *Silver Harvest* drives deeper into the grey winter water, each cut pulls more impossible weight from the hold: heavy, cold ingots where roe and gut should be. The crew notices. The skipper calculates. And something ancient stirs in the brine, waking to the taste of metal on the tide. Catriona's inheritance isn't luck—it's a bargain the sea made long ago, and the debt is coming due.

Atmospheric, visceral, and shot through with the salt-and-iron poetry of a vanishing way of life, *The Herring Girl's Lucky Knife* hauls up a story where folklore bites hard against the grind of industrial fishing, and one woman's blade may be the only thing sharp enough to sever a curse older than the fleet.