On the Sponge Islands

""A work of singular focus, the scholarly memoir On the Sponge Islands includes illuminating bits of natural history alongside its accounts of a tour through the Greek sponge trade."" — Karen Rigby, Foreword ""The author mixes this story with her own observations of the region’s sunkissed charms, as well as its more ominous signs of decrepitude, cruelty, and inner turmoil."" — Publishers Weekly “Sponges famously can regenerate from a few cells, a fragment, when almost all has been lost. With humility, curiosity, and compassion, Martin considers how communities regenerate from the devastation and transformations of war, migration, exile, and technological change; and how our collective and personal histories both sever and bind.” — Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces “A fascinating and troubling tale of the human relationship with ‘the living mind of the sea,’ superbly researched and told with empathy and insight. I will never look at a sponge, or any other harvested sea being, in the same way again.”   — Kapka Kassabova, author of Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe “What does it mean to remember a sea? On the Sponge Islands understands how the death of a marine ecosystem and the fading of a community’s memory are the same catastrophe, registered at different depths. This is a book of marvelous lyricism and rigorous thought about what we have taken from the sea and what might yet remain. Julia Martin is a writer of rare precision, and this is her most far-reaching work.” — Hedley Twidle, author of Show Me the Place