Out 14 March · The fourth novel
The Salt Line
A novel about the year the boats stopped going out, and the daughter who came back to watch it happen.
Three winters after the fleet was sold, Marin Bray comes home to a harbour town that has learned to live without the sea. She has her mother’s house on the slipway, a biscuit tin of unopened letters, and eleven weeks before the pier is taken down.
Ardagh writes the way weather arrives: quietly, from a long way off, and then all at once.
The Connacht Review
Hardback · 336 pages · Also in ebook and audio, read by the author
About
Who is writing this
Dear reader,
I write about harbour towns because I grew up in one, and because I have never got over how fast a place can stop being what it was. Four books in, it is still the only subject I have, and I have stopped apologising for that.
Every first draft is longhand, in a numbered hardback notebook, at a window on the second floor of a house above the Claddagh. I am on notebook thirty-one. Nothing goes near a screen until the whole shape exists on paper, which is slow, probably foolish, and the only way I know how to find out what a book is about.
Between books I read manuscripts for other people, teach one day a year on first chapters, and swim at Blackrock every morning, including the mornings I would rather not. Everything else is in the books.
The books
Four novels, two collections, two anthologies
Everything in print, newest first. Each one opens on its own page with the first pages, the publisher and where to find a copy.
The Salt Line
2026 · Ferryman Press, Dublin
Harbour Light
2024 · Long Walk Books
The Quiet Fleet
2023 · Blackrock Editions
Ninety Fathoms
2022 · Ferryman Press, Dublin
Notes from a Low Shore
2021 · Blackrock Editions
Small Weather
2020 · Blackrock Editions
A House by the Slip
2019 · Ferryman Press, Dublin
Nine Tides
2018 · Long Walk Books
Dates
Where to find me
Readings, festivals and one workshop. New dates go up here before they go anywhere else.
14 Mar 2026
Launch night: The Salt Line
Charlotte Quay Books, Dublin Launch
The first public reading from the new book, with a conversation and a signing afterwards.
02 Apr 2026
In conversation: writing the coast
Spring Words Festival, Cork Festival
An hour on harbour towns, parish records and what a place remembers about itself.
19 Apr 2026
A day on first chapters
The Old Customs House, Galway Workshop
Twelve places. Bring nine hundred words of something unfinished.
Sold out
By the numbers
Twelve years of it
The fourth one out in March
One a book, plus the ones that went nowhere
Ninety Fathoms has travelled the furthest
Blackrock, seven in the morning, no exceptions
Praise
What other people have said
Ardagh has the rarest thing a novelist can have: she knows exactly how long to stay in a room. I finished The Salt Line at four in the morning and then sat there for an hour.
Nobody writing in Ireland is better on work, and on what it does to a family when the work goes. She writes fishermen the way other people write kings.
I have taught Winter Crossings for six years and the students always find something I missed. That is the test, and it keeps passing.
She read for forty minutes, answered everything anybody asked, and stayed until the last person had their copy signed. We rebooked her before she left the building.
The journal
Notes between books
A letter roughly once a month: what I am reading, what is going wrong in the draft, and whatever the tide has brought in.
The last week of a first draft
Notebook thirty-one is nearly full, which means the ending is close and I have started doing all the wrong things.
What I take to a festival
Twelve years of readings has reduced my packing to one bag, four things in it, and one rule about the water glass.
Nine hundred words is enough to tell
I read twelve openings a year on the workshop day, and I know by the end of the first page. Here is what I am actually reading for.
Beyond the books
What I can be booked for
Four things I say yes to, and roughly what each one involves.
Reading and conversation
Forty minutes from the new book and then whatever the room wants to ask. I bring my own copies if the festival would rather not carry stock.
A day on first chapters
Twelve people, nine hundred words each, and one long afternoon on why an opening either earns the second page or does not.
A long letter about your novel
I read the whole thing once for the story, then again with a pencil, and write you six or seven pages on what the book is trying to be.
Anthologies and introductions
Commissioning, shaping and writing the front matter for collections. Two so far, both for small presses on the west coast.
One last thing