Sea Bean

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To write a message in a bottle, or a story for an imagined reader, both are labours of love, sent out without guarantee in the hope they might one day be found and read. I do hope Sally's message is found and read by many - I've no doubt they'll be better off for it Books From Scotland A notable addition the canon of beachcombing literature . . . the inspiring story of a woman coming to terms with a life-changing medical condition by finding beauty and interest and wonder in the infinite variety of things she finds washed up along the shore Scotsman Bob Mortimer wins 2023 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with The Satsuma Complex Take a Look at Our Summary of November Highlights, Whether You're Looking for the Latest Releases or Gift Inspiration

There are many beautiful and poignant passages where she connects with others whose lives intersect with hers through the shoreline’s secrets — a wise woman in her chair overlooking the bluster of the ocean completely unruffled by heavy gales; another regaling how as a child she climbed out of her window with her sister to walk precarious jagged clifftops, which lingers long after reading. Huband is a great observer — she is as fascinated with characteristics and the granular detail of people as she is the energies of the shoreline. Her observations are often dreamlike and poetic and capture the essence of someone so much you can almost feel you are stood a few feet away from them. Sea Bean is a coastal treasure. In Sally's writing, beachcombing - an old island pursuit - is modern, revealing and restorative. The next time I'm at the shore I will have a deeper appreciation and curiosity'. Amy Liptrot.These days it’s verging on cliché to interpret women’s nature writing as a cypher for trauma or a means of understanding the human body. Yet it is impossible to ignore an ever-growing genre of Scottish nature ‘memoir’ that uses a re-encounter with the natural world for this very purpose. Equally, it is impossible to deny that this emerging form of nature writing is some of the most exciting work to be produced in Scotland today. Now, we can add Sally Huband’s Sea Bean to that list. Familiar in its form, like the best books of its kind, Huband’s debut works within these parameters to create something unique, weaving together mythology, community and ecology in a profoundly moving story of overcoming disability and rediscovering your place in the world. Unfortunately for Sally the changes to come are more profound than she might reasonably have expected. Pregnancy triggers chronic illness and her hopes of finding a relevant job that would cover the cost of childcare don’t materialise. It’s a difficult period of readjustment and reinvention that will be broadly familiar to many, maybe all, woman (and plenty of men too). The specifics are unique to each of us, but the experience of compromise is universal and falls particularly heavily on mothers. Sea Bean is a profoundly moving memoir that's perfect for fans of Raynor Winn, Helen Macdonald and Amy Liptrot. When I got my copy it came with a promotional postcard showing a message in a bottle which prompted me to message the publicist to tell her the story of my father finding this message in a bottle. She replied that this was the sort of connection the book was full of, it is, dad's story is mentioned in passing. It's also these connections, finding the things that draw us together that make island life work. Huband talks about building a community of care in a sometimes stifling community of place - she hasn't been afraid to speak out on contentious local issues - build enough connections with people and you can withstand the pressure to keep quite and keep the peace. SEA BEAN is a coastal treasure. Its hard-won attentiveness shows the wonder and vulnerability of our interconnected oceans, wildlife and people. In Sally's writing, beachcombing - an old island pursuit - is modern, revealing and restorative. The next time I am at the shore I will have a deeper appreciation and curiosity -- Amy Liptrot

It would be easy to mistake this book as one of wistful reflections on the tide from its title. Huband avoids over sentimentalisation of the human pull to the sea edge, and never falls into cliché or superfluous prose. She is discerning, justifiably ireful at times, restless, and questing. Her words invigorate, feel rhythmic and relay a clear sincerity and integrity. Though I never felt this in words, it reminded me that there was a way out, that there was a way to make my suffering useful. Beautiful even.’ — Melissa Febos Moving to Shetland changed all that. She arrived in the islands in 2011 after spells in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, relocating with her helicopter pilot husband and their infant son. In Shetland the seas rage, the winds blow hard, and the haar can drop fast and hang around for days. She didn’t need a map to tell her she was nearer Stavanger than London, and as anyone who has been there knows the cultural and linguistic bonds between the archipelago and its northern neighbours are deep and abiding. “Shetland is quite a remarkable place, one of these places where myth and folklore feel very possible. It’s such a remarkable seascape and landscape that your mind is more easily opened to this otherworldly element.” So Huband had more than just beachcombing on her mind when she sat down to write Sea Bean, her first foray into long-form writing.

Sally Huband Press Reviews

Which leads well into the use of the myth. Throughout the book, found objects are placed within stories told and retold across generations. Catshark eggcases figure in a Shetland folktale about Death and grief, while the sea bean, we are told, has been used as a protective charm all along the north-east Atlantic, and an aid during childbirth. However, in the book’s unexpected final chapter, the discovery of a story of Shetland women accused of witchcraft reveals the sea bean to have once been linked to the devil. When Sally further discovers its modern use as a gift for survivors of domestic abuse, the message is clear. This is not simply one person’s story of recovery, but a story about all people, past and present injustices, and what we can learn about this from the shoreline and its gifts. As Sally writes, ‘in these islands it is not unusual for the weather, the body and magic to coalesce’. Sea Bean is a beautifully brave book about finding one's place in an uncertain world. For Sally Huband that place is the Shetland shoreline, where her extraordinary beachcombing finds in times of limiting illness connect her to the greater waters of wild wonder, ecological grief and the possibilities of community. It's a profoundly illuminating journey through the seas that ultimately encircle us all. But what makes this journey so special is that its movement comes from waiting; it emerges from the great patience and care needed to uncover the stories that are washed ashore from elsewhere. Sea Bean will change the way you look at the world's coasts Julian Hoffman Her succinct summery of what’s happening with the local windfarm development is an example of something that’s proved beyond the control of local people to change. The power generated will be cabled down to mainland Scotland, Shetland will be left to deal with the consequences of becoming an industrialised landscape just as its beaches collect the consequent rubbish of other industries. Sally’s search for a sea bean begins not long after she moves to the windswept archipelago of Shetland. When pregnancy triggers a chronic illness and forces her to slow down, Sally takes to the beaches. There she discovers treasure freighted with story, and curiosities that connect her to the world.

Elsewhere in the book Huband visits the Dutch island of Texel, which takes beachcombing so seriously that it appoints officials to oversee the collection of finds and the auctioning off of anything of value which isn’t claimed. And she delves deep into a beachcombing subculture, those whose own passion is for putting messages in bottles and trusting them to the tides. Or ‘sea post’ as Huband calls it. Sea Bean is a message in a bottle. An interconnection of our oceans, communities and ourselves, and an invitation to feel belonging when we are adrift. Sea Bean is a message in a bottle. An interconnection of our oceans, communities and ourselves, and an invitation to feel belonging when we are adrift. About This Edition ISBN:With no rheumatology care available on Shetland during the pandemic, the last few years have been especially hard. On top of that, Huband caught Covid-19 early on which triggered a bad relapse. Too often, her beloved beaches became unreachable. “I’m just starting to get it managed again, so it has been a long two years,” she says. There are some sour paragraphs on breastfeeding and contamination of human milk which I felt should have been rounded out (although the (almost certainly deceptively) simple and abrupt words "I didn't enjoy it" perhaps explain why that was not the choice that was made in the writing or, apparently, the research). I was surprised too at the gaping hole where the controversies around the grindarap should be in the section on the Faroes (I don't think the word is even mentioned). Huband moved to Shetland in 2011 with her husband and baby son. The house they’ve been living in isn’t child friendly and they’re struggling to find another one. Motherhood doesn’t appear to be compatible with progression in her academic career either, so when her husband is offered a job in Shetland it sounds like it was an easy decision to go. The wild shores of Shetland offer glimpses of orcas swimming through the ocean at dusk, the chance to release a tiny storm petrel into the dark of the night and a path of hope. This beachcombing path takes her from the Faroese archipelago to the Orkney islands, and the Dutch island of Texel. It opens a world of ancient myths, fragile ecology, and deep human history. It brings her to herself again.

A naturalist and conservationist by trade, Huband was born in Portishead near Bristol in England’s south-west. Her childhood views were of a coal-fired power station and a chemical works, and beyond that the sluggish Severn Estuary. But although she grew up by the sea she says she didn’t feel “any mythical or uncanny connection with it. I just found it quite terrifying really. It was just miles of endless sinking mud.” Sea Bean is a message in a bottle. An interconnection of our oceans, communities and ourselves, and an invitation to feel belonging when we are adrift.

On an even more personal note it is also a memoir of Huband’s own struggles. She writes openly about her miscarriages and movingly about the invasive medical procedure which follows, known as an evacuation of the retained products of a conception. She broaches her depression and the dark thoughts about self-harm which seized her and which she didn’t feel able to talk about in case she was deemed unfit to look after her son. And throughout the book she writes about the chronic health condition which has afflicted her for over a decade now, a debilitating form of arthritis. Sally Huband's Sea Bean is the first of these hits - it will easily be one of my books of the year, but more than that, it's one of a handful of things that I've read early or in proof and felt that it's something special. I hope my instinct is right on this one too.