A brave, honest memoir about love and loss, Held by the Sea is also an intimate portrait of the author's husband, the playwright, Nick Darke, and a meditation on Cornwall and its natural history. Writing with a lyrical intensity, she negotiates the strange, lonely madness of grief and the peculiarities of widowhood with warmth and wit. She describes the twenty-five years she spent with Nick candidly and sets their relationship and her unfolding grief within the landscape of the North Atlantic Coast, finding solace in the ocean waves, the shifting sands, fishing, the minutiae of rockpools and the moon. Thoroughly recommended.