Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides - Hardcover

Nicolson, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865476365 ISBN 13: 9780865476363

Publisher: North Point Press, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

From Publishers Weekly

For his 21st birthday, Nicolson's father gave him some islands among the Scottish Outer Hebrides, 600 acres worth of land that the elder Nicolson had purchased on a whim in 1937. At various times, the Sussex-based writer recalls, the Shiant islands "have been the most important thing in my life," and he has produced a vivid, meticulously researched paean to his "heartland," examining its geology, its flora and fauna, and its history as he reminisces about his own idylls there. The islands, now uninhabited except by the Nicolsons, are outcroppings of grass and rock and stark black cliffs, surrounded by churning waters that are notoriously difficult to negotiate. Until 1901, they were continuously inhabited for thousands of years by an eighth-century hermit, medieval farmers, Irish Jacobite rebels and others documented by Nicolson. The islands are also an important breeding station for birds, and Nicolson observes the comings and goings of geese, puffins and razorbills. Throughout the book, Nicolson explores the troubling idea of ownership; Hebrideans view English landowners with a mix of resentment and derision, and Nicolson acknowledges that his rights to the islands, like those of previous landlords, are morally ambiguous. 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.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: North Point Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0865476365
• ISBN 13: 9780865476363
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400