Synopses & Reviews
A riveting book for all readers who know and love a place where the sea meets the land.In 1937, Adam Nicolson's father answered a newspaper ad -- "Uninhabited islands for sale. Outer Hebrides, 600 acres . . . Puffins and seals. Apply . . . " -- and found the Shiants (the name means holy or enchanted islands). Adam inherited this almost indescribably beautiful property when he was twenty-one: Sea Room describes, and relives, his love affair with the three tiny islands, composed as he prepares to give them to his oldest son.
The Shiants lie east of the Isle of Lewis in a treacherous sea once known as the "stream of blue men," after the legendary water spirits who menaced sailors there. For millennia they were a haven for those seeking solitude -- an eighth-century hermit, the twentieth-century novelist Sir Compton Mackenzie -- but their rich, sometimes violent history of human habitation includes much more. The landscape is soaked in centuries-old tales of restless ghosts and Bronze Age gold, and it cradles the heritage of a once productive world of farmers and fishermen. In passionate, keenly precise prose, Nicolson evokes the paradoxes of island life: cut off from the mainland yet intricately bound to it, austere yet fertile, unforgiving yet bewitchingly beautiful.
Sea Room does more than celebrate this unique, profoundly isolated place. It shares with us the greatest gift an island bestows on its inhabitants, a deep, revelatory engagement with the natural world.
Review
"His mix of scholarship, reflection and lyrical description brings his beloved atolls to life, and the genre-bending book should win some fans among those interested in nature writing and memoir." Publishers Weekly
Review
"[W]hat is best in the book is Nicolson's intensely sensual detailing of his sailing of the waters around the islands; of air, rock, soil, flora, and light; of the spirituality historically assigned to the place and which lingers there; and of what it must have been like to live there over the centuries. Magnificent and poetic." Booklist, starred review
Review
"More intellectually weighty than most travel narratives, Nicolson's book offers as much information about the geological origins of the islands, the seasonal details of the flora and fauna, and the melding of Norse language into the culture as it does about the author's solitary boat rides and peaceful beachcombing adventures." Library Journal
Review
"His writing is clear as sharp, informative, and exact as the explanation he gets from the shipwright but it's also sensitive to the hauntings and holiness of the islands....Nicolson's love letter to the Shiants is a summing-up, rich with history and curiosity." Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Adam Nicolson has written many books on history, travel, and the environment. He has won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize. He lives on a farm in Sussex.