Coasting

Author: Jonathan Raban

Paperback

'A valuable book and a necessary one. One of the funniest and cleverest voyages on record.' Christopher Hitchens, New Statesman

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Summary

'A valuable book and a necessary one. One of the funniest and cleverest voyages on record.' Christopher Hitchens, New Statesman

Description

'A valuable book and a necessary one. One of the funniest and cleverest voyages on record.' Christopher Hitchens, New Statesman

'The finest writer afloat since Conrad.' Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Guardian

'Unfailingly witty and entertaining.' Salman Rushdie

Coasting round Britain single-handed in an antique two-masted sailing boat, Jonathan Raban conducts a masterly exploration of England and the English at the time of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War. He moves seamlessly between awkward memories of childhood as the son of a vicar, a vivid chronicle of the shape-shifting sea and incisive descriptions of the people and communities he encounters. As he faces his terror of racing water, eddies, offshore sandbars and ferries on a collision course, so he navigates the complex and turbulent waters of his own middle age. Coasting is a fearless attempt to discover the meaning of belonging and of his English homeland.

About the Author

Born in 1942, Jonathan Raban taught English and American Literature at university until the age of 27, when he achieved his childhood ambition and began to earn his living as a writer. Combining literary criticism with writing fiction and for the radio, he was a much admired stylist on the London literary scene. From the late 1970s he began increasingly to travel, finding in these journeys the raw material from which to fashion his literary art, the background against which to try to understand his life and the lives of others. Married three times, he now lives in Seattle, not far from his only daughter.