Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger

Description

'Wild and wonderful ... I doubt anyone will ever match Strandings for its sheer bravura, its wry insight, and its absolute, engulfing, and brilliantly enlivening whaleheadedness' - PHILIP HOARE, ALBERT AND THE WHALE When Peter Riley was thirteen, a woman with blue hair and a comet tattoo asked him to help load the jaw of a sperm whale into the back of a Volvo 245. The encounter set Riley on a decades-long quest to make sense of what had happened. Enter the secretive world of whale scavengers. When a whale washes up on one of Britain's coasts, a fugitive community descends to claim trophies from the carcass. Some are driven by magical beliefs. Some are motivated by profit: there is a black market for everything from ambergris to whaletooth sex toys. But for others, the need goes much deeper. Join Riley on a tour of a stranded kingdom's weird outer reaches, where nothing is as it seems. Meet witches, pedlars, fetishists, conspiracy theorists and fallen aristocrats. And prepare for a final revelation, as the mystery of the comet woman tangles with the enigmatic symbol of Leviathan itself, beached on Britain's fatal shore.

Peter Riley has been investigating stranded cetaceans and their afterlives since his teens. He lectures in American literature at Durham University, with a special interest, naturally, in Herman Melville. Strandings won the inaugural Ideas Prize for nonfiction.

'A wild and wonderful whale chase, of cetaceans real and surreal and imagined, Peter Riley's beautifully written book adopts the sceptical/obsessive tone of a modern Melville (or perhaps that should be Captain Ahab) as he roams Britain from east to west, north to south, in search of usually dead and often rotting whales and the stories they leave in their wake. There's no box of dusty bones he won't stick his nose in, no dubious character on a beach he won't shake down for stolen whale teeth. Indeed, Riley's so interwoven with his subject that I doubt anyone will ever match Strandings for its sheer bravura, its wry insight, and its absolute, engulfing, and brilliantly enlivening whaleheadedness' - Philip Hoare, author 'With wit and a whale-lover's passion, Riley explores the cultural and emotional bonds that form between humans and our sea-dwelling, mammalian cousins - both alive and dead. Strandings is at once incisive and funny, personal and historical, gripping and moving' - Merlin Sheldrake, author 'Erudite, funny and sad - a glorious rollercoaster of a book whose twists and turns take us again and again to the dissolving edges between reality and mirage' - Jean Sprackland, author 'A marvellous read. Subversive, jaunty, poignant, deadly serious and relentlessly entertaining' - Charles Foster, author 'A tremendously enjoyable book, a gleefully peculiar mixture of grief and gore populated by a shadowy cast of oddballs, the only certainty the dead whales at its heart' - Jessie Greengrass, author