The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod

A rediscovered classic of nature writing: the poetic account of a solitary year spent observing the wild beauty of Cape Cod\nWith an introduction by Philip Hoare\nA fragment of land in open ocean, the outermost beach of Cape Cod lies battered by winds and waves. It was here that the writer-naturalist Henry Beston spent a year in a tiny, two-roomed wooden house built on a solitary dune, writing his rapturous account of the changing seasons amid a vast, bright world of sea, sand and sky.\nTransforming the natural world into something mysterious, elemental and transcendent, Beston describes soaring clouds of migrating birds and butterflies; the primal sounds of the booming sea; luminous plankton washed ashore like stardust; the long-buried, blackened skeleton of an ancient shipwreck rising from the dunes during a winter storm; a single eagle in the endless blue.\nWith its rhythmic, incantatory language and its heightened sensory power, The Outermost House is an American classic that changed writing about the wild: a hymn to ancient, eternal patterns of life and creation.