Silver Shoals

¿A wonderful and important book, that from its first pages draws the reader along on a fascinating, gripping, often funny journey.¿ Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland.

An idiosyncratic history of our island story told through five iconic fish

On these rain-swept islands in the North Atlantic man and fish go back a long way. Fish are woven through the fabric of the country¿s history: we depend on them ¿ for food, for livelihood and for fun ¿ and now their fate depends on us in a relationship which has become more complex, passionate and precarious in the sophisticated 21st Century.


In Silver Shoals Charles Rangeley-Wilson travels north, south, east and west through the British Isles tracing the histories, living and past, of our most iconic fish ¿ cod, carp, eels, salmon and herring ¿ and of the fishermen who catch them and care for them.


In the company of trawlermen, longshoremen, conservationists and