Philip Marsden’s Solo Sail Along the Irish and Scottish Coasts

Just got this beauty of a book in my mail chute from Granta Books in London. It’s written by British writer Philip Marsden, who is quite an able sailor. For his new book, he set out from near his home in Cornwall, sailing northward between the east coast of Ireland and the west coast of Scotland, then on his return journey southward hugging the west coast of Ireland. His destination was the Summer Isles across from the scenic village of Achiltibuie in Scotland. I’d read the first third of the book in a bound galley, but waited for the finished book which I knew would have good, detailed maps.

Reading a new book by Philip Marsden is a special treat because in 1995 I had the pleasure of publishing an early book by him as part of the Kodansha Globe trade paperback series. In his travel narrative The Crossing Place: A Journey Among the Armenians, Marsden crossed seventeen national borders, encountering Armenian communities throughout Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central Asia to meet monks in Venice, auto mechanics in Damascus, mercenaries in Beirut, and tailors in Transylvania, all in the shadow of the calamitous genocide of 1915 committed by the Turkish government.

I’ll add that I also have a personal connection to the eponymous Summer Isles of Marsden’s voyage. As chronicled in this blog post about the Scottish novelist Neil Gunn, with my wife, painter Kyle Gallup, we rented a sweet vacation cottage in Achiltibuie and took a boat trip through the magical isles. It will be a joy to dive back in to Marsden’s book this weekend, who another favorite author, Robert Macfarlane, has dubbed “a truly remarkable writer.”