The Living Will Say Hello (Picador Shorts)

In this standalone extract from Adam Nicolson’s Life Between the Tides, the reader gets a close-up view of some of the ocean’s most intriguing characters.

The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes. Look down as you crouch over the shallows and you will find a periwinkle or a prawn, a claw-displaying crab or a cluster of anemones ready to meet you. No need for binoculars or special stalking skills: go to the rocks and the living will say hello.

In this distilled version of the powerful, revelatory Life Between the Tides, Adam Nicolson takes the reader on a wonder-filled tour of some of the animal residents of the rock pools that are the stage for so much of the life and poetry of the ocean.

We visit with the sandhopper, prawn, winkle, crab, and anemone, and each episode reenacts the book’s idea of the inner drama of life in this cloistered and vibrant space.

Nicolson writes “with scientific rigor and a poet’s sense of wonder” (The American Scholar). He animates the world of the rock pool and provides an essential perspective on a marine world as intricate and infinite as our own and not much further off than the tips of our noses.

The Living Will Say Hello is part of the Picador Shorts series “Oceans, Rivers, and Streams,” in which excerpts from beloved classics speak to our relationship with our water bodies, great and small.