Dimensions
129 x 198 x 28mm
The sea surrounds us. It gives us life, provides us with the air we breathe and the food we eat. It is where we came from, and it carries our commerce. It represents home and migration, ceaseless change and constant presence. It covers two-thirds of our planet. Yet caught up in our everyday lives, we seem to ignore it, and what it means.
In THE SEA INSIDE, Philip Hoare sets out to rediscover the sea, its islands, birds and beasts. He travels from the south coast where he grew up, a place of family memory, to the other side of the world. From the Isle of Wight to the Azores, from Sri Lanka to Tasmania and New Zealand, he encounters animals and people, living and extinct. He gathers their legends and their reality: the outcasts, the travellers and the survivors.
Navigating between human and natural history, between science and myth, he asks what their stories mean for us now, in the twenty-first century, when the sea has never been so important to our present, as well as to our past and future.
From Southampton Water to the Pacific Ocean, from eccentric Englishmen and women to reclusive saints and tattooed warriors; from gothic ravens to the greatest whales, from endangered dolphins to extinct thylacines, The Sea Inside is part bestiary, part memoir, part fantastical travelogue. It is filled with astounding tales of faith and wilderness, discovery and destruction, fear and beauty. But more than anything, it is the story of the natural world, and the sea inside us all.
