Newly widowed Luda Managan and her teenage children, Darcy and Min, move to the “storm-bruised islands” of northern Scotland thinking they can leave behind their grief and drought-ruined farm in Australia. But the past travels with us, of course, and this fragile family is haunted by personal trauma and the dark history of the island that becomes home.

Salt and Skin opens dramatically as a local fisherman takes them out on his boat so Luda can photograph the eroding cliffs to document the damage climate change is doing to the islands. They watch a mother and child walking on a beach and Luda’s camera captures the moment a rockfall buries the little girl. As a photojournalist, she publishes the image without foreseeing the parents’ distress and the community’s anger.

Eliza Henry-Jones’ Salt and Skin is a compelling story loud with warning voices for our time.

She’s done it before. Driven by her campaigning ardour, she published a photograph of Darcy curled up in a dry dam, his secret misery imprinted on the climate-ravaged land. Now 16, he has not forgiven his distracted mother for turning him into a meme.

The family rents “the ghost house” on the imagined tidal island of Seannay, its stone walls carved with “witch’s marks” as protection against evil. Luda learns that five women on the island were tried as witches – four of them executed – in the 17th century for crimes such as “calling whales from the sound and riding upon them like horses”.

Australian author Eliza Henry-Jones wrote Salt and Skin after a visit to Orkney, an island group off the north coast of Scotland. Entranced by the wild landscapes and the history of witch trials, she has spun an action-packed, emotionally intense family drama with elements of Gothic mystery, feminist ghost story and eco-thriller.

Salt and Skin by Eliza Henry-Jones.

Though at times Salt and Skin slips uneasily between genres, there are flattering echoes of Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock and Lucy Treloar’s Wolfe Island.

Henry-Jones has written both adult and YA fiction, she has qualifications in counselling for grief and trauma and drug and alcohol addiction, and is working on a doctorate in climate change-related trauma. Her novel shows all those concerns. There are also delicate traces of the poetry she wrote first, and her home on a flower farm, in the gorse-veiled, watery setting.

For Luda and Darcy the light on Seannay makes visible every old scar on their own and others’ skin as their background is gradually revealed in the course of almost three years. Fourteen-year-old Min seems more resilient and in love with the islands than her bookish brother. Yet she learns to free-dive to inhuman depths and returns with marine garbage, lecturing her mother, “We need to fix the damage we’ve done.”

Henry-Jones reflects the before-and-after shifts in her characters with subtle repetitions and reversals: “She is Min. She is not Min.” Darcy and Min’s coming-of-age is enriched and complicated by friendship with Theo, a feral boy who washed up on Seannay with webbed hands and no known past. The islanders suspect he’s a selkie, half-human, half-seal, and a mainland writer comes to investigate.

Among the large cast of precisely drawn characters are women with links to the islands’ witchcraft and Father Lee, a villainous priest whose sly control of his congregation keeps the witch trials alive. The red and yellow sandstone kirk and its dungeon, modelled on Orkney’s St Magnus Cathedral, dominates the town. Religion, superstition and science, male violence and female nurturing clash as the novel reaches its operatic climax.

Salt and Skin is leavened with joy and humour. One of the most endearing characters is the earth-bound, ordinary Tristan, an archaeologist who works and banters with Luda in the council office. He bangs away at his computer, mutters to himself and grimaces at every sip of coffee. This made me laugh: “Luda has come to the conclusion that he doesn’t actually like coffee, but isn’t ready to admit it to himself.”

Domestic life, work, love and sex carry on against the melodrama of worsening storms, beaching whales and human tragedy. Henry-Jones blends past and present, reality and magic into a compelling story loud with warning voices for our time.

Salt and Skin by Eliza Henry-Jones is published by Ultimo Press, $32.99.

Eliza Henry-Jones is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.com.au). The Age is a festival partner.

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