Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach

Description

Featured on Radio 4 Book of the Week in 2012. This is the ultimate beachcomber's book from a prize-winning poet and natural storyteller. Think Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin. Strands describes a year's worth of walking on the ultimate beach- inter-tidal and constantly turning up revelations- mermaid's purses, lugworms, sea potatoes, messages in bottles, buried cars, beached whales and a perfect cup from a Cunard liner. This is a series of meditations prompted by walking on the wild estuarial beaches of Ainsdale Sands between Blackpool and Liverpool, Strands is about what is lost and buried then discovered, about all the things you find on a beach, dead or alive, about flotsam and jetsam, about mutability and transformation - about sea-change.

Jean Sprackland is the author of five previous poetry collections, including Tilt, which won the 2007 Costa Poetry Award. She has also published a book of non-fiction, Strands- A Year of Discoveries on the Beach, which won the 2012 Portico Prize. She lives in London.

A fine book... Transparent, undeceived prose -- Kate Kellaway * Guardian * Compelling ... well-contextualised, sharply-observed, clued up, environmentally aware and deeply researched * Independent * With clarity and candour, in the natural voice of a modern storyteller, she tells what she sees at the intersection of herself and whatever is delivered to her by the tide * The Times * Sprackland has a wonderfully curious eye * Financial Times * Simply gorgeous ... One of the finest piece of writing, nature or otherwise, to emerge this year * Big Issue *