The Sea Inside – Reviews

‘This book is as bracing as a great blustery lungful of ozone-filled air … Hoare has wonderful, almost child-like relish for colourful stories and incredible facts … His passionate engagement will infect you.  As you close this book, you will probably feel as ecstatic as the author does after one of his cold morning dips.’ 

Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times

‘As befits its subject, ‘The Sea Inside’ has a broader, more protean remit [than Leviathan], but Hoare's accounts of ravens or ecstatic monks always somehow find their way back to cetaceans.  His is a profound and lyrical love affair.’

Bella Bathurst, The Observer

‘A collage of memoir, cultural history and travelogue in which the author makes pilgrimage to ever more distant seas to swim with whales and dolphins.  These encounters yield some of the most vivid writing in the book, charged with the same awe and joy that characterised Hoare's retelling in the last chapter of Leviathan of a close encounter with a sperm whale near the Azores … glorious stuff.’

Caspar Henderson, The Guardian, ‘Book of the Week’

‘This enthralling book exhibits Hoare’s talent both for writing about nature and for bringing to life the human dramas played out over centuries on or beside the sea.’

Ian Critchey, Sunday Times

‘Hoare’s enthusiasms are boundless, tempered only by a pleasing morbidity … Each page is home to a new nugget of interest … The Sea Inside is packed full of strange delights … ’

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday