A Need for the Sea, Hervé Hamon

"I didn't choose the sea, and it didn't choose me. I have the sea as some friends have faith: through an innocent lightning strike, alien to reason and calculation."

In this first-person book, Hervé Hamon set out to describe and share his need – for shores, tides, islands, sailing, ports. He invites us to travel from Ushant to the mists of Newfoundland, from the icebergs of Greenland to the sea mountains of Crete. He invites us to take to the sea to touch land. He speaks of his Brittany, where he is solidly anchored, but he is not chauvinistic: the sea, and the sea alone, circles the world.

"Being a sailor," he writes, "is to practice leaving." He addresses all those, sailors or farmers, city dwellers or people of the swell, who live a passion, taste its pleasure, and know themselves to be mortal. To all those who, in one way or another, love the open sea.