Secrets of the Sea
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"I read it with complete absorption, wholly immersed in its world. It has a palpability and veracity which is quite mesmerising. A tremendous piece of work."--William Boyd, award-winning author of The Blue Afternoon and Restless
Financial Times,
`Shakespeare's acute ear for language lends grace and poignance to this billet doux to passion, courage and the Tasmanian hinterland.'
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Two people bump into each other in a small town on the south coast of Tasmania. Alex was raised on a local farm but sent to Cumbria, UK, to be educated. He's stayed in the UK to study and work but returned to Tasmania after his parent were tragically killed in a road accident. On a spur of the moment decision Alex decides to remain in Tasmania and make a go of his father's farm - something his father never managed to do.
Merridy, has returned to to village to nurse her dying father, breaking her University Studies at Melborne in order to do so.
Alex and Merridy marry and set about building and developing the farm. Their lives are haunted by their inability to have children. And both of them also have demons from a past life that have to be cast off. Their inability to produce a child, to deal with these demons, and the interventions of a few outsiders who come into their lives brings things to a crisis.
This is a lovely story, wonderfully written by Shakespeare. I really enjoy his novels. They are simply very good stories well told. And this is no exception.
Recommended.
Merridy, has returned to to village to nurse her dying father, breaking her University Studies at Melborne in order to do so.
Alex and Merridy marry and set about building and developing the farm. Their lives are haunted by their inability to have children. And both of them also have demons from a past life that have to be cast off. Their inability to produce a child, to deal with these demons, and the interventions of a few outsiders who come into their lives brings things to a crisis.
This is a lovely story, wonderfully written by Shakespeare. I really enjoy his novels. They are simply very good stories well told. And this is no exception.
Recommended.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Secrets of the Sea is little more than the cliched plot of a women's magazine story, padded out to nearly 500 pages with irrelevant guff. The characters are unconvincing and the (male) author is not successsful at portraying the main female character. There is no unity to the plot as there are too many scenes which lead off at unresolved tangents - very annoying and sloppy! Other parts, however, are too neatly tied up with completely unrealistc encounters between characteres. As for the style, it is a total travesty of the illustrious name borne by the author. The English language is massacred by a complete disregard for grammar, whereby the author links direct speech to a following action, omitting the subject of the verb. The one star this book has earned,in my estimation, is for the author's passionate description of the Tasmanian terrain and for the knowledge he imparts about oyster farming, which might interest some people!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Snowleg, I was really looking forward to Shakespeare's new novel, only to be bitterly disappointed. Secrets of the Sea is slow, boring and badly written to put it mildly and has nothing of the qualities that made Snowleg so good. Don't bother with this; it has nothing to recommend it whatsover; indeed, it's hard to believe that Snowleg and Secrets of the Sea are written by the same author.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A Beautiful Love Story.
Nicholas Shakespeare is a superb writer, and whilst this book is not in the same ilk as "The Vision of Elena Silves" or "The Dancer Upstairs", it is still beautifully written, and... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Mrs. E. Jagger
The best fiction I have read in a while
I write reviews whilst trying not to give away the plot so excuse the lack of plot detail. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Read more
Published on 21 April 2009 by J. Walton
An enjoyable read that falls short of the standards set in Snowleg
There seems to be a growing fashion among British novelists to write about erectile dysfunction. First we had Ian McEwen's prematurely ejaculating protagonist in On Chesil Beach,... Read more
Published on 5 Nov 2008 by J A C Corbett
"You'd better start living. We're dead an awfully long time."
Set on the remote southeast coast of Tasmania, the isolated island at the southernmost tip of Australia, Nicholas Shakespeare's latest novel examines the lives of Alex and Merridy... Read more
Published on 31 July 2008 by Mary Whipple
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