Over the course of a year, Jules Pretty walked along the shoreline of East Anglia in southeastern England, eventually exploring four hundred miles on foot (and another hundred miles by boat). It is a coast and a culture that is about to be lost—not yet, perhaps, but soon—to rising tides and industrial sprawl. This Luminous Coast takes the reader with him on his journey over land and water; over sea walls of dried grass, beside stretched fields of golden crops, alongside white sails gliding across the intricate lacework of invisible creeks and estuaries, under vast skies that are home to curlews and redshanks and the outpourings of skylarks.East Anglia's coastline is as much a human landscape as it is a natural one, and Pretty is equally perceptive about the region's cultural heritage and its "industrial wild": fishing villages and the modern seaside resorts, family farms and oil refineries, pleasure piers and concrete seawalls, cozy pubs and military installations. Through words and photographs, Pretty interweaves stories of the land and sea with people past and present. He is a passionate and sensitive guide to a region in transition, under stress, and perhaps even doomed, as finely attuned to its history as he is to its unique sensory world.

The Acclaimed International Bestseller “It is impossible to do justice to the beauty of Returning Light. The whole book is a poem.” — New York Times Book Review By the lighthouse keeper on the remote, otherworldly Irish island of Skellig Michael, a "profound memoir about the importance of place and what it really means to belong" (Belfast Telegraph) “On Skellig Michael, thousands of birds appear and disappear, erecting towers, coming together in wings of movement which build and unravel over the empty sea. Often, no one else is there to stand beside me on the island. The mind wanders; links with the past are easily made; ancient ways of viewing things come alive.” In 1987, Robert Harris happened upon an unusual job posting in the local paper—a new warden service was being set up on the island of Skellig Michael, and the deadline was imminent. Just weeks later he was on his way to set up camp in one of Ireland’s most remote locations, unaware that he would be making that same journey every May for the next 30 years. Here he transports us to the otherworldly island, a place that is teeming with natural life, including curious puffins that like to visit his hut. From the precipice he has observed a coastline that is relatively unchanged for the last thousand years—a beacon of equilibrium in an ever-changing world. But the island can be fierce too. It’s inhabitable for only five months of the year, and solitude can quickly become isolation as bad weather rolls in to create a veil between Skellig Michael and the rest of the world, when the dizzying terrain can become a very real threat to life. A beautiful and evocative work of nature writing, Returning Light is an extraordinary memoir about the profound effect a place can have on us, and how a remote location can bring with it a great sense of belonging.

Soon after crossing the drawbridge from the mainland, you'll reach a fork in the road and face your first decision at Wrightsville Beach. Bearing left will take you to the famous Johnnie Mercer's Fishing Pier and near the site where a giant sperm whale named Trouble once washed ashore and refused to leave. Bearing right will take you to the classic downtown and points south, including the Coast Guard station and the site of the late, great Lumina Pavilion.Either way, you can't go wrong.Either way, you'll find a vibrant mixture of old and new.Either way, amid landscape-altering attacks by both nature and developers, you'll find the constancy of waves against sand.Wrightsville Beach: The Luminous Island is Ray McAllister's homage to a special place, a book that captures not only Wrightsville's history but also its heart. Along the way, he shares stories of fires and hurricanes, Captain Kidd and David Brinkley, beach trolleys and Big Bands.Unlike most of the North Carolina coast, Wrightsville had a sizable population base, thanks to nearby Wilmington. Development didn't begin early here, but once it started, it came hard and fast. By the early 20th century, Wrightsville was beckoning family vacationers to its simple beach cottages and day-trippers to its dance floors, cinemas, and sundry amusements.Through all the changes, Wrightsville has never forgotten the hospitality that made it such a destination in the first place. Just ask the airplane full of Pennsylvanians who fled here to escape one of America's first man-made disasters. Or the thousands who continue to come for happier reasons today.