The story in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a story told through an unusual convention: the novel is literally a fictitious government file consisting of diary entries, emails, newspaper articles, official government interviews/interrogations, personal letters, a script for a tv show, etc.  All of the documents included in the 'file' tell the story of how a Yemeni sheikh wants to introduce salmon fishing into the Yemen and how Alfred Jones, a British civil servant and scientist, and Harriet Chetwode Talbot, a British solicitor do their best to help him to make this dream a reality.  As the experiment fails in tragedy, the government opens up an investigation into the event.

The class identified themes in the novel:

We then looked at/analyzed the characters in the novel: