A memoir of place, memory and motion, of seafarers, and the author’s connections to them and to the sea.

Linda Cracknell’s quest to learn more about her seafaring family history brings her to a blustery harbour. As she throws a line to pull in a boat, she is struck by the parallel with her mission to reel the past closer to the present, to find her place in a family tree full of mariners whose lives were defined by the ebb and flow of tides.

Exploring coastlines from Scotland to Cornwall by boat and foot, she retraces the footsteps and paths of her ancestors across marshes, clifftops and waves. She travels in a 121-year-old sailboat and helps to build a community rowing boat. Gradually, she understands that the women in this story were the linchpins of the coastal communities they lived in – and the undertow of her own identity. All the while, she is untangling her complex relationship with her mother.

What begins as a quest for legacy takes Linda well beyond, as she discovers something more elemental and unconscious in her pull to the sea, imagining her blood as salt-saturated, sea-marked.

Linda Cracknell is a writer of narrative nonfiction on the natural world, as well as of fiction and radio scripts. Her first story collection was nominated for Scotland’s National Book Awards and the Robin Jenkins Literary Award for environmental writing, and her essay collection Doubling Back: Ten Paths Trodden in Memory, about journeys she took on foot in Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, and Kenya, was serialized for BBC Radio as a Book of the Week. All of Linda’s writing is inspired first and foremost by place, and she teaches nature and place writing.