Category: 20 Books of Summer

Book Review – The Draw of the Sea by Wyl Menmuir #20BOS26

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About the Book

Since the earliest stages of human development, the sea has fascinated and entranced us. It feeds us, sustaining communities and providing livelihoods, but it also holds immense destructive power which can take all those away in an instant.

It connects us to far away places, offering the promise of new lands and voyages of discovery, but also shapes our borders, carving divisions between landmasses and eroding the very ground beneath our feet.

In this beautifully-written meditation on what it is that draws us to the waters’ edge, author Wyl Menmuir tells the stories of the people whose lives revolve around the sea in the Cornish community where he lives.

Format: Hardback (299 pages) Publisher: Aurum
Publication date: 5th July 2022 Genre: Nonfiction

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My Review

I was fortunate enough to meet Wyl when we were both members of the judging panel for the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2026. At the time he was engaged in restoring a sixteen foot wooden Wayfarer dinghy at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth. The project is documented in his latest book, Seaworthy, due for publication in 2028 but if you can’t wait that long you can find lots about the restoration on his YouTube channel.

For many years now my husband and I have made an annual trip to Falmouth and it’s always a thrill when the train crosses the Tamar Bridge and we know we’ve arrived in Cornwall. Therefore it was an obvious choice for me to pick up Wyl’s book The Draw of the Sea since much of the book focuses on Cornwall, his adopted county, along with the Scilly Isles. (Since The Draw of the Sea was published, Wyl has written two further books: The Heart of the Woods, about the role of trees and woodlands in our lives, and The Spirit of Stone, which explores the ways in rock and earth form part of our identities, histories and futures.)

The Draw of the Sea is the product of Wyl’s conversations with people who are drawn to, and interact, with the sea in different ways. Everyone from sailors, fishermen, surfers and marine biologists to pilot gig rowers, artists and even mermaids. As he notes wryly, ‘Ask ten different people what they see when they look at the coastline and you will get eleven different answers.’ The beachcombers (known as ‘wreckers’ in Cornwall), watching for the approach of storms or scanning online forums for news of container spills. Surfers, watching for the perfect wave. Gig rowers and sea swimmers, seeking out flat, sheltered water.

There is a really engaging personal element to the book. We get to learn a lot about Wyl’s own interests: surfing, sailing, swimming, beachcombing. There’s a lovely section in which he describes a day out with his wife, son and daughter searching for cowrie shells on a sandbar. ‘While the finding of cowries is an individual pursuit, the keeping of them is not. We admire each other’s finds and then pool them. At home, we have a glass jar on a shelf on the French dresser to which we add our cowries. […] They are a family archive of time spent together. […] They are heavy with memory, of the sensation of the sun on my back, the squelch of bladder-wrack and kelp beneath my feet, of the sound of the children laughing together.’

His curiosity and willingness to ‘get stuck in’ is evident as he tries his hand at crafting a belly board, learning how to free dive and joining the crew of a three-masted tall ship in Svalbard.

As you might expect, there is a strong ecological message. One of the very early chapters focuses on the prevalence of plastic and other detritus of human activity amongst things washed up by the sea. Bizarrely, this includes LEGO pieces from a container spill in the 1990s, with particular items being prized by collectors. And he describes the rise of protest groups such Surfers Against Sewage. Perched on a cliff top looking out to the horizon, he observes, ‘It would be easy to believe the sea went on forever, that it would take all we could throw at it and then some. It is the kind of thinking that got us to where we are now, the kind of thinking that runs along the lines that the seas are big enough to restore themselves, that they will continue to provide as they always have done, the the warning signs we are seeing now are blips.’

The book has some wonderful black and white photographs. I particulary enjoyed the Glossary of Sea Words which includes many old Cornish words. For example, ‘bremming’ the term for the glow caused by a school of mackerel when they disturb phospherescent blooms or ‘cowsberny’ to describe a sea that is the colour of cow dung.

The Draw of the Sea is a fascinating book that will make you reflect on your own relationship with the sea, whether that’s memories of childhood seaside holidays building sandcastles, cliff top birdwatching, walking coastal paths or simply enjoying the sheer thrill of watching waves crash against the shore.

The Draw of the Sea is book 15 of my 20 Books of Summer.

In three words: Thought-provoking, insightful, expansive
Try something similar: Dark, Salt, Clear by Lamorna Ash

About the Author

Wyl Menmuir is an award-winning author based in Cornwall. His 2016 debut novel, The Many, was longlisted for the Man Booker Award Prize and his second novel, Fox Fires, was published in 2021. Wyl has written for BBC Radio 4’s Open Book, The Guardian and The Observer, and his short fiction has been published by the National Trust and Nightjar Press among others. He is co-creator of the Cornish writing centre, The Writers’ Block, and lectures in creative writing at Falmouth University.

Connect with Wyl
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Book Review – Country People by Daniel Mason @johnmurrays #20BOS26

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About the Book

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family.

So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, who possesses, in Kate’s, words, ‘a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere’. Soon he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales – from a ghostly tree surgeon, to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress, and a photographer of snowflakes – until at last he stumbles upon a bizarre local legend, which, he begins to suspect, might not be a legend at all.

Format: Hardcover (320 pages) Publisher: John Murray Press
Publication date: 7th July 2026 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

I like to imagine Daniel Mason sitting at his desk in his room at Stanford University eating an apple (an ‘Osgood’s Wonder’ in case you’re curious). In front of him is a receptacle, possibly an object found while foraging or perhaps a gift from a grateful PhD student. It contains pieces of paper, each with a different genre written on it, intended to be a source of inspiration for his next book. Will he pluck out ‘historical fiction’ meaning he embarks on something like The Winter Soldier again? Or will it be ‘short stories’ meaning another collection along the lines of A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth? He pulls out a piece of paper. It reads ‘contemporary fiction, but make it funny’.

I found it impossible to write a ‘traditional’ review of Country People. Instead here are ten things I loved about it:

  1. The route planned by Miles for the family’s three week journey to Vermont taking in ‘twenty-seven states, eighteen important wildlife areas, a national park no one had ever heard of [and] forests in states popularly conceived of as having no forests’
  2. The family’s introduction to the convenience food of rural America: ‘hot dogs the color of an old lady’s nail polish’, ‘energy drinks with fascist fonts’, ‘Pennzoil-colored meat sticks’
  3. Miles’s insatiable curiosity and childlike enthusiasm for mastering new skills: scything, skate skiing, learning the Basque language
  4. The eccentric characters: drama teacher Nausicaa, mastermind of the local school’s fully inclusive production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Titus Andronicus having being rejected as unsuitable); The Rat Man of Vermont; snowflake photographer Bentley; Hugh, nature trail guide and hollow-earther
  5. The humour: the transcripts of calls to the local radio phone-in programme The Miscellanous Minute, ‘the only Minute that’s actually an Hour’; Kate’s friend Miranda’s published works including ‘Trends in Mini-Horses’, ‘Can-Throwing Behaviours of Rural American Males’ and ‘Community Threads: Tracing Social Change Through Clothing Labels’
  6. The heartwarming history of Miles and Kate’s relationship and the challenges they have faced and overcome together
  7. The meetings of the Jeremiah Wylkes Society
  8. The Easter eggs’ for those who’ve read North Woods
  9. The family’s transition from outsiders to ‘country people’
  10. The curtain call for everyone you’ve encountered in the book that demonstrate just how immersed Miles has become in the local community

Country People made me smile, even laugh out loud on a few occasions which is rare for me. I can’t wait to find out what genre Daniel Mason picks for his next book. I’m pretty sure I’ll read it whatever it is.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of John Murray Press via NetGalley. Country People is book 5 of my 20 Books of Summer.

    In three words: Clever, funny, heartwarming
    Try something similar: North Woods by Daniel Mason

    About the Author

    Daniel Mason is a physician and author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier (2018), A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020) – a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize – and North Woods (2023). His work has been translated into 28 languages, awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Piano Tuner was produced as an opera by Music Theatre Wales for the Royal Opera House in London, and adapted to the stage by Lifeline Theatre in Chicago.

    His short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All Story, Zyzzyva, Narrative, and Lapham’s Quarterly, and have been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Prize.

    A Clinical Assistant Professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, his research and teaching interests include the subjective experience of mental illness and the influence of literature, history, and culture on the practice of medicine.

    Connect with Daniel
    Website