Coasting

Eland Publishing Ltd, London, 2018. Good secondhand condition.

In 1982, Jonathan Raban set sail on a voyage around his native land. He furnished a small boat with books and pictures and took to the sea, making a looping journey around the British Isles.

The voyage took him deep into history, his own and his country's and put him in touch with unfashionable figures out of his past...Hillaire Belloc, for example who wrote THE CRUISE OF THE NONA in 1925 about his own adventures at sea. Raban is at his best in these encounters, and they cut across all classes...poets, priests, bums, politicians, tourists.

It is the surrounding sea and all its moods that haunts the pages of COASTING. Raban, is a latterday Pilgrim on a modern Progress, and his voyage of discovery is one in which a man comes to terms with his life and with the larger meaning of home. (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)