Salt to the Sea Summary
Ruta Sepetys

Salt to the Sea Overview

Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys is a piece of historical fiction in the first-person with an alternating point of view style. It is an account of a group of refugees in 1945 Poland fleeing the advancing Red Army and brought together in one place purely by chance. Each character has a very different personality but all are forced to put their differences aside in order to survive. They are all concealing a secret of some nature and have their own struggle to gain passage to the ship set to take other evacuees to safety. The ship, being grossly overburdened with up to 10,000 people, is eventually attacked by a Russian submarine, resulting in the greatest single maritime disaster in history. Through telling the complex personal stories of each character, the human tragedy of the event is revived in detail, and an often-neglected and overlooked aspect of the Second World War is remembered once more.