“Extraordinarily moving, exquisitely written, and socially revolutionary.” — The Irish Times “ Ring of Salt is so vast and tender and urgent, it’s almost like reading a novel. I couldn’t put it down. I haven’t cheered for a heroine like Betsy in ages.” —Jen Hatmaker, author of Awake For readers of Maggie Smith and Stephanie Land, an inspiring and lyrical memoir about a writer and mother who flees an abusive marriage and must learn to reclaim the story of her life through a search for home on Ireland’s wild, western coast. At twenty-four, Betsy Cornwell runs away to Ireland for a fresh start. Leaving behind a painful past, she chases her dream of becoming a novelist to the misty shores of the Aran Islands. There she meets a handsome and charming horse trainer, and her life takes on the glow of a fairy tale when they elope to Gretna Green. Five years later, her happy ending has twisted into a nightmare. Betsy is trapped in an abusive marriage, isolated and afraid with a newborn baby. On her son’s first birthday, she must flee home again, this time turning to the women around her—her local survivor support group, a trusted family friend, and an online Smith College alumnae network—for help she’d never known she could ask for. After a brush with homelessness, she struggles to scrape together a living for herself and her son. On sleepless nights, she scrolls through real estate listings that might as well be castles in the air, and starts to foster an impossible dream: What if she could use her writing to buy a home, one that no one could take away from her and her baby? One that might become a haven, not just for her family, but other single parent artists and writers, too? When she discovers a historic knitting factory and former cinema on Ireland’s rugged Connemara coastline, left empty and crumbling for years, that precarious dream becomes her lifeline. Over the next two years she works to crowdfund the old knitting factory’s purchase by sharing its story and her own, in candid posts that range from the unexpectedly steep learning curves she encounters with home renovations and internet dating, to her heartbreaking fight to keep custody of her son, with her growing online community. But as the deadline to buy nears, she realizes she will have to reckon with everything she believes about family, survival, and what happily-ever-after truly means for her dream to have any chance of coming true. Ring of Salt combines a powerful and relatable narrative of survivorship and healing with lush writing about the windswept landscapes and rich mythology of rural Ireland to craft a real-world fairy tale about the ordinary, but no less life-changing, forms of magic we can all access: vulnerability, community, and the power of telling your own story. " Ring of Salt is one of those rare gems: a survivor story that is not only redemptive and inspirational–a lifeline of hope, a handbook of resilience, for readers who have gone or are going through any kind of sustained trauma or life-threatening hardship or crisis–but also a memoir that’s as beautiful as it is courageous. . . The author’s narrative skill drives the story unrelentingly forward. She can drop sentences that have the power to emotionally wind the reader or flood our minds with beauty. Communicating her own and others’ stories from the downtrodden margins of traumatic experience, Ring of Salt nevertheless glows with what we need: the loving kindness of care, nurturing and people helping one another." —The Irish Times “Full of promise and resil­ience. . . Cornwell writes with a poet’s eye about the Irish landscape, the sea and her little garden, seamlessly weaving in bits of Irish folklore, history and fairy tales as she processes her abuse and learns to dream again. Ring of Salt makes the reader feel the pull of rural Ireland and root for Cornwell’s unlikely project to come to fruition.”— Bookpage "Addicting...it will suck any reader in quickly, and for those who find themselves in Betsy's position, it will be a lifeline – a painful, admirable gift offered up so they will now see escape is possible." —Irish Independent “There are books you read, and then there are books that read you: books that reach into your heart and extract experiences you thought were yours alone, holding them up to the light so you can see them clearly. Betsy Cornwell’s is that kind of book… She offers us something precious: permission to believe that we, too, can break ourselves free.”— Hippocampus Magazine "Heartwrenching, profound...this is a story of resilience, new beginnings, and the magic of found family.” — Irish Country Magazine “Betsy Cornwell has written a wondrous book. Free of the pitfalls of sentimental and saccharin prose one often sees in memoir, it is a book of resilience and fortitude, and a testament to the power of determined women. This book renewed something in my own heart. A beautiful tale of love, survival and commun