Philip Marsden

Philip Marsden is the award-winning author of a number of works of travel, fiction and non-fiction, including The Bronski House, The Spirit-Wrestlers, The Levelling Sea and, most recently, Rising Ground.  After years of travelling, he now lives on the tidal upper reaches of the River Fal in Cornwall with his wife, children and various boats.

The Summer Isles sees Philip Marsden voyage by boat from Cornwall to Ireland and Scotland, up through the Hebrides to a small group of uninhabited islands in the far north. Philip’s course overlaps with routes that have been followed by sea-farers for centuries, but as much as the journey of men, the book will “explore the journey of ideas through the imaginary fringes of our archipelago, and the way that the sea around us has shaped our language, our history and our culture far more than we usually realise.”

Combining travel writing, memoir and cultural history, The Summer Isles is a rich and evocative book about the search for real places, for imagined places, and for places that might always exist somewhere in between.