I’ve enjoyed a few great fact and fiction books about the coast recently. The Storm Girl was a great story with a twin timeline entwining the life of a smuggler from the 17th century with a woman renovating an old smugglers pub in Dorset. Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain was about Britain’s lost cities, ghost towns and vanished villages, some of which were washed away into the sea, such as Winchelsea and Dunwich. Being surrounded by the sea can have a profound effect on a person, and we all love to escape to the coast when we can. The next best thing surely is reading a good book about it!

The Ship Asunder: A Maritime History of Britain in Eleven Vessels by Tom Nancollas

If Britain’s maritime history were embodied in a single ship, she would have a prehistoric prow, a mast plucked from a Victorian steamship, the hull of a modest fishing vessel, the propeller of an ocean liner and an anchor made of stone. We might call her Asunder, and, fantastical though she is, we could in fact find her today, scattered in fragments across the country’s creeks and coastlines. This extraordinary book collects those fragments for a profound and haunting exploration of our seafaring past.

In his moving and original new history, Tom Nancollas goes in search of eleven relics that together tell the story of Britain at sea. From the swallowtail prow of a Bronze Age vessel to a stone ship moored at a Baroque quayside, each one illuminates a distinct phase of our adventures upon the waves; each brings us close to the people, places and vessels that made a maritime nation.

Weaving together stories of great naval architects and unsung shipwrights, fishermen and merchants, shipwrecks and superstition, pilgrimage, trade and war, The Ship Asunder celebrates the richness of Britain’s seafaring tradition in all its glory and tragedy, triumph and disaster, and asks how we might best memorialise it as it vanishes from our shores.

I enjoyed reading this book. It’s a tour of Britain’s ports, coasts and islands with an imaginary ship built from fragments acquired across the centuries.

Disclosure – thanks to Netgalley for a review copy. The Ship Asunder was published by Penguin Books on 31st March 2022.