The rising sea -- He gazes to the shore -- The star like sorrows of immortal eyes -- Something amazing -- The people of the sea -- zero and everything together -- under a green sea -- the handsome sailor -- Stella maris -- The sea that raged no more.

In this watery book, Philip Hoare, the prize-winning author of Leviathan and The Sea Inside, goes in pursuit of human and animal stories of the sea. Of people enchanted or driven to despair by the water, accompanied by whales and birds and seals - familiar spirits swimming and flying with the author on his meandering odyssey from suburbia into the unknown.
Time, space, gender and species become as fluid as the sea.
Here humans challenge their landbound lives through art or words or performance or myth, through the animal and the elemental. And here they are forever drawn back to the water, forever lost and fount on the infinite sea.