By the time you finish reading Sea Room, you may or may not have fallen in love with the Shiant Isles, but you will surely have fallen in love with their principal inhabitants, a quarter of a million puffins.  Curious, loveable, sociable creatures.  How appropriate to think of their flying shadows patterning the grass like a mirrored sphere spinning on a 1950s dance floor.

‘Perhaps because of the way the puffins wheel across this corner, their shadows cast onto the grass like the revolving patterns of light and dark from a Fifties dance floor.’

See the quote rich mosaic review of this magnificent, entrancing book: a love letter to islands and a paean to the sea. 

Source: Adam Nicolson, Sea Room: An Island Life (London: Harper Collins, 2013 (2002)), p. 110

Photo credit: Mikael Kristenson at StockSnap.io