Somewhere Else

Description

A beautifully crafted, darkly humorous collection of fly-fishing stories destined to become, like Thomas McGuane's The Longest Silence, a classic of the genre. Somewhere Else is a thousand miles away and right next-door. It's a place and state of mind. It's the Himalayan foothills of Bhutan where trout - coal-backed relics of a place misty and Celtic - rise to bright insects under bamboo; it's London's suburbs where rivers run municipal fountains, but in a brook in a garden-centre there is hope in fishy form; it's a phone box in a field on the Lesotho border; it's getting away from calls at night about double glazing; it's the raw feeling of being pushed up against another place. A journey to somewhere else can change you, and perhaps change is the measure of the journey. In fourteen beautifully crafted stories Rangely-Wilson takes us fly-fishing around the world, from the Canadian forest to upland Croatia, from the Scottish islands to the suburbs of London, always journeying into the heart of the landscape to meet ordinary, extraordinary people. Somewhere Else is a book about escaping from what you think you know, to find out how things really are.

Charles Rangeley-Wilson is an award-winning writer. He is a passionate conservationist, founder of the Wild Trout Trust and the Norfolk Rivers Trust and advisor to WWF on English chalk streams. He is the author of two books of travel and fishing writing, The Accidental Angler, which was also televised by the BBC and Silt Road- The Story of a Lost River. His other work for BBC includes the critically acclaimed film Fish! A Japanese Obsession. He lives in Norfolk with his wife and two children.

It's the search for poetry and meaning that moves me the most... [This is]a nice, idiosyncratic work that gave me much enjoyment -- Thomas McGuane At last, some fishing stories with wit, dialogue and characterisation in them. Deft, laconic, and thrilling in places, Charles' wide-ranging debut is a welcome antidote to the Podsnappery of much of the sport's literature: I reckon you could enjoy this book even if you had never picked up a rod -- David Profumo, author of Sea Music An intense, round-the-world fly-fishing adventure which sucks you in from first page to last... A fine collection of short stories * Scotland on Sunday *