RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

Philip Hoare is the author of six works of non-fiction, including Leviathan or, The Whale, which won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Most recently, The Sea Inside (2013) was published to great critical acclaim. Hoare is also an experienced broadcaster, a Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honourary doctorate in 2011. He lives in Southampton.

'Rarely have I read a book that felt as if it were speaking so directly, so confidentially to me. RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR is about books and about swimming, but most of all it does what all great books do: makes you feel that it's a private conversation between you and the author. I finished it with an obscure feeling of privilege, to have been granted such access to Hoare's most secret, intimate self ... RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR is a masterpiece' Alex Preston, Observer

'A rich and strange combination of memoir, travelogue and literary biography ... RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR contains much of wonder in words strewn across its pages like treasures revealed on the sand by a retreating tide' Caspar Henderson, Financial Times

'This is an exquisite read, stuffed with dark myths and eerie legends, nourished by the author's sublime gift for poetic description' Michael Simkins, Mail on Sunday

'Hoare conveys a redemptive sense of the wide, continuous and beautiful world, in a remarkable book that sometimes feels rather loosely fitted together, but is always rich and strange' Guardian

'His idiosyncratic tales of mariners, adventurers and the odd dilettante rise almost to the level of poetry ... he evokes the sense of majesty that a seascape can inspire in us' Clive Davis, The Times

'Wonderful...This beautifully written book is a delight'BBC Radio 4

The themes and preoccupations are familiar from Hoare's previous writing ... but their revisiting here reveals a landscape as exhilarating different as that of the foreshore from one tide to the next' Jane Shilling, Evening Standard

'Hoare writes with a beautiful and liquid assurance, luxuriantly at home in this half-modernist, half-conventional medium and capable of astonishingly realised visions of floating moments and sea encounters' Adam Nicholson, Spectator

'A swirling, poetic reverie' Esquire

'He is poetic and precise...a rich portrait of the sea as an imaginative landscape' TLS

'Written with a poetic beauty' i newspaper