Customer Rating: 
Summary: simply incredible writing
Comment: Seven-tenths is a bookshop's nightmare of a book. Where to place a book which describes maps, islands, love, loss, death and passion - in poet's language?
Taking our complex relationship with the sea as the starting point, this book is a philosophical meditation on the sea as physical birthplace of our race and the emotional abyss of our dreams. Moving between aspects of science, cartography, biography, poetry and philosophy, this book is, unsurprisingly, difficult to define or describe. It is simply outstanding. The language is hauntingly beautiful, even when describing exactly what happens to a human body during and after a burial at sea, as it sinks through miles of water.
James Hamilton-Paterson has an unflinching gaze coupled with a poet's exactitude. If my house were burning and I could save only one book from the multitudes, this would be it.
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