Ant developed a fascination for the natural world at an early age, becoming especially passionate about fishing and diving. It has been a constant theme throughout his life and so, when he was diagnosed with Parkinson's at the early age of 48 years, it was devastating. However, he was fortunate enough to be offered ground-breaking brain surgery which enabled him to continue to enjoy life. From the thrill of catching bass and the excitement of diving for lobster and bull huss to the humour ...

It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Award-winning poet Kathleen Jamie has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary writer.Whether she is following the call of a peregrine in the hills above her home in Fife, sailing into a dark winter solstice on the Orkney islands, or pacing around the ...

For as long as he can remember, Ben Fogle has been surrounded by creatures great and small. As a young boy his best friends were Liberty and Lexington, the family dogs. Then there was Milly the puma-sized cat, Jaws the goldfish and three very ‘charismatic’ parrots, not to mention a whole host of weird and wonderful animals that came through the doors of his father’s veterinary practice.Then came Inca, Ben’s adorable black Labrador, who changed his life. Since first melting the nati...

Forgotten Footsteps won Creative Non-Fiction Wales Book of the Year 2013.Following Wales' Book of the Year Award 2011 winning Cloud Road, comes Forgotten Footprints, a history of the Antarctic Peninsula, South Shetland Islands and the Weddell Sea, the most visited places in Antarctica. In 12 years John has visited over 40 times and guides and lectures on adventure cruise ships. He delivers a selection of highly readable accounts of the merchantmen, navy m...

Wyl Menmuir’s The Draw of the Sea is a beautifully written and deeply moving portrait of the Cornish Coast and the people who make their livings there, examining the ephemeral but universal pull the sea holds over the human imagination.‘A beautiful portrait of lives shaped by the swell of ocean and tide - a powerful salt-thread of connection’ - Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path

Mark Dodd arrived in Broome in 1978 as a 20-year-old looking for adventure, after working his way across northern Australia. There he fell in with the crew of the fabled DMcD, one of the last of the old wooden pearling luggers that still worked the Kimberley coast diving for pearl shell. He came aboard as a deckhand before graduating to become one of the pearl shell divers. He dived for four seasons, living a life on the luggers and in the pubs and exotic alleys of Broome that would have b...

The story of more than sixty years of diving adventures, through starkly contrasting locations and extraordinary advances in technology. From boyhood dreamer to master treasure hunter, Hugh Edwards documents his life through tales of shipwreck and salvage.the story of more than sixty years of diving adventures including his significant find of the Batavia, Hugh Edwards documents his life through tales of shipwreck, treasure hunting and salvage.Brought up on tales of pirates and grea...

A startling new book, his most personal to date, from Philip Hoare, co-curator of ’Moby Dick: Big Read and winner of the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for ‘Leviathan’.The sea surrounds us. It gives us life, provides us with the air we breathe and the food we eat. It is ceaseless change and constant presence. It covers two-thirds of our planet. Yet caught up in our everyday lives, we barely notice it.In ‘The Sea Inside’, Philip Hoare sets out to rediscover the sea, its islands, ...

One summer, writer and musician, Jasper Winn set himself an extraordinary task. He would kayak the whole way round Ireland - a thousand miles - camping on remote headlands and islands, carousing in bars and paddling clockwise until he got back where he started. But in the worst Irish summer in living memory the pleasures of idling among seals, fulmars and fishing boats soon gave way to heroic struggles through storm-tossed seas ... and lock-ins playing music in coastal pubs.Circlin...

Gavin Francis fulfilled a lifetime's ambition when he spent fourteen months as the base-camp doctor at Halley, a profoundly isolated British research station on the Caird Coast of Antarctica. So remote, it is said to be easier to evacuate a casualty from the International Space Station than it is to bring someone out of Halley in winter.Antarctica offered a year of unparalleled silence and solitude, with few distractions and very little human history, but also a rare oppurtunity to...

This collection of true diving stories makes for compelling reading for all divers. Enjoy classic tales of this extreme watersport, from thrilling wreck discoveries to encounters with the bizarre and the beautiful. There are stories of death and disaster, as well as bravery and triumph. Tales of the exciting and the extreme rub shoulders with more poetic pieces about the people and places that make up the folklore of this fascinating sport. The author's global tour takes you everywhere, fr...

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 ...