Swamp Songs

PRAISE FOR SWAMP SONGS: Growing up in the Hebrides, on the edge of the Lewis moor, I have my own experience of swamps and bogland, often trudging through them in my youth to cut peats and gather grazing sheep. 'Swamp Songs' by Tom Blass granted me strange and unfamiliar experiences of such locations, allowing me to glimpse and discover new but often similar horizons. Enriching and magical, his writing was a pleasure to read. -- Donald Murray PRAISE FOR THE NAKED SHORE: Tom Blass's The Naked Shore is a wonderfully bracing journey around the North Sea. His gaze misses nothing, and his robust prose glitters with story and lore and surprise -- Philip Marsden A hugely enjoyable anti-tour, and a wonderful eulogy to an implacable ocean * Times Literary Supplement * Tom Blass champions a subtlety of vision, a determination to discern the marvellous in the unprepossessing * Daily Telegraph * Remarkable ... I was relieved to find that his work is not of the trendy Thoreau-esque school of travel writing, but more down to earth ... Terrifically enjoyable * Literary Review * Captivating ... Rich, evocative prose ... Part travelogue, part history book and part anthropological study, Blass's intensely rewarding memoir succeeds in scattering some light into the North Sea's cold and murky depths, revealing both its wonders and its indivisible relationship with humanity * Independent * Tom Blass' riveting new book, The Naked Shore, is so extremely good that we hope it will bring a warmth and richness to your early spring reading. That said, you'll probably want to dive into this fabulous account somewhere indoors rather than settling down on a blustery beach * Guardian * What a joy to roam with Tom Blass through some of nature's most unjustly maligned and underappreciated habitats, where webs of life interconnect wildly and wondrously with human stories. Swamp Songs is a delicious blend of ecology and culture. -- Amy-Jane Beer