There’s a wonderful story of the traditional method of hunting conger eels in Scilly – you suspend a small boy in front of the hole in which they live, wait for the eel to wrap itself around him and then pull the boy up. The book’s first chapter draws on the work of the Cornish playwright Nick Darke, whose final film was a documentary charting the history of Cornish wreckers. The photographs and maps add to that, ranging from the intimate - beach gleanings or individuals - to the epic - seascapes and wild views.

These interactions are interspersed with recollections and meditative musings about what the sea means to him and his family as he tries to answer the question: why it is that some of us are unable resist the force of the tide on our souls?Wyl Menmuir's The Draw of the Sea is a beautifully written and deeply moving portrait of the sea and the people whose livelihoods revolve around it, examining the ephemeral but universal pull the sea holds over the human imagination.

forget about touching grass, i need to touch THE SEA I NEED TO GO INTO THE WATER I NEED TO DIVE INTO THE SEA! The book is oriented south westerly, with the chapters taking place either in Cornwall or on the Isles of Scilly, 25 miles further out into the Atlantic. The book benefits from the fact that Menmuir is part of the communities described here - this isn't a journalists's fleeting account, it's grounded (maybe I should say watered? In this lyrical meditation on what it is that draws us to the waters' edge, author Wyl Menmuir tells the stories of the people whose lives revolve around the coastline and all it has to offer.

Head further west and you’ll find all of this and more on the tiny gems that make up the archipelago of Scilly, in which the stillest seas can turn to raging torrents in a matter of hours as the wind switches. They reach blindly out with their extensive members in the hope of encountering a nearby mate – of either sex, barnacles being hermaphroditic. It is here that Menmuir and his family holiday and Scilly serves as a kind of dream landscape for him, one in which he is more easily able to immerse himself in the maritime world. It's grim reading in places, but we do also meet people who are trying to make a difference - and the author admits that there can be a sort of syncronicitous beauty in the bizarre findings from beaches, even in all that plastic. In fact the book itself is a gorgeous item, the cover a treat to the eye, the endpapers marbled, the photos atmospheric and numinous.