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 its a private conversation between you and the author. I finished it with an obscure feeling of privilege, to have been granted such access to Hoares 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 authors 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 WonderfulThis beautifully written book is a delightBBC Radio 4 The themes and preoccupations are familiar from Hoares 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 precisea rich portrait of the sea as an imaginative landscape TLS Written with a poetic beauty i newspaper
Philip Hoare is the author of several books, including Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant; Noel Coward; Oscar Wildes Last Stand; Spike Island; Englands Lost Eden; Leviathan, or, The Whale, winner of the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction; and The Sea Inside. He lives in Southampton.