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‘Haunting, brave, breathtakingly beautiful’ Isabella Tree

‘Magnificent’ Boston Transcript

Henry Beston planned to spend only two weeks in his newly built cottage on the outer beach of Cape Cod. As summer drifted into autumn, however, he found himself so entranced by the landscape’s rhythms and beauty that he could not bear to leave.

Settled in his isolated house facing the North Atlantic, Beston spent a year immersed in the raw, elemental life of the great beach around him. Observing the migrations of seabirds, savage winter storms and the constantly shifting interactions between sea and shore, he wrote of the passing seasons in ecstatic, riveting detail.

A highly influential classic of American nature writing, The Outermost House is a vital precursor to today’s masters of the genre. Impassioned and richly layered, it is a matchless evocation of the spirit of a place and the enduring appeal of the wild.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Introduced by Philip Hoare.

Henry Beston (1888-1968) was born in Quincy, Massachusetts and educated at Harvard. He wrote many books in his lifetime, including a memoir of his years in the volunteer ambulance corps in the First World War, an account of life in the US Navy and a book of fairy tales. The Outermost House, widely considered his masterpiece, was published in 1928. His Cape Cod house was named a National Literary Landmark in 1964, and it was destroyed by a huge winter storm in 1978.

Philip Hoare is the author of eleven works of non-fiction. His book Leviathan or, The Whale won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. He has since published many sea-themed works, including The Sea Inside, RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR and, most recently, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love.