Playing With Water
Alone on a Philippine Island
James Hamilton-Paterson author
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Faber & Faber
Published:16th Oct '14
Should be back in stock very soon
Playing With Water by James Hamilton-Paterson is a true tale of passion and solitude on a Philippine island.
'One June day in 1953 aged twelve I sat in a classroom and drew a map.'
The map that the young Hamilton-Paterson drew was of a tropical island, and it prefigured with uncanny accuracy the Philippine island on which, thirty years later, he would spend a full third of each year, entirely alone.
'One June day in 1953 aged twelve I sat in a classroom and drew a map.'
The map that the young Hamilton-Paterson drew was of a tropical island, and it prefigured with uncanny accuracy the Philippine island on which, thirty years later, he would spend a full third of each year, entirely alone. It had a coral strand, a field of grass, vertical volcanic cliffs and no water. He survived by fishing and by drinking rainwater.
This is a book about a remarkable and self-sufficient writer's 'desire to be lost', and the journey of a conventionally educated Englishman to an island on the far side of the world that aroused in him a feeling of discovering a place he always knew. Hamilton-Paterson writes with incomparable skill about the hard beauty of the sea, of coral reefs and the animals that live in them, and about the fishermen who eke a living among the labyrinth of islands that make up the Philippines.
ISBN: 9780571313990
Dimensions: 198mm x 126mm x 19mm
Weight: 236g
304 pages
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