(Fourth Estate / Atico de los Libros, Spain / Mare Verlag, Germany / Einuadi, Italy; The Whale, Ecco USA).
Winner of 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. A gripping voyage of discovery into the heart of an obsession.
‘Philip Hoare was long been acclaimed as a brilliantly unconventional writer … This is the book he was born to write, a classic of its kind’, Rachel Cooke, The Observer.
3.30 am: the stormy sea picks me up and carries me away; it's holding me to ransom, but no-one's going to pay
5 am: the rainy glittery night, the sea out of time; everything more beautiful than it ever was before
5 am: the hardness of the January sea, stripped bare and black by the cold I get out: if I stood still long enough, I'd be covered in frost
'I was innocent of the sin of the Ancient Mariner; time after time I warned Captain Ahab to accept happiness' W. H… t.co/XzDszp0nba