This is a beautiful book, eloquent and evocative. Reading it felt like a meditation. Julie Blaxland lives with her husband Giles and Chuffy the brindle greyhound in the house of the title on a rapidly eroding part of the Suffolk coastline.
Here is how she puts it: ‘I live in a house on a windblown clifftop at the easternmost edge of what used to be the easternmost parish of England. The church fell into the sea in 1666, and this house – itself called the Easternmost House – has probably only three summers left before it too is lost to coastal erosion.’
Yet this book is a celebration of that house and everything around it, the sea, the cliffs, the beach, the farms, the farm animals, the wildflowers, the wildlife and the people. The author writes as though she is talking directly to you and she has some wonderfully descriptive turns of phrase. Lyrical, poignant and witty, this book is a moving testament to a still enormously vibrant but vanishing time, place and way of life. It’s also a lovely little object in its own right, well-designed and with an elegant and striking cover.
The Easternmost House is published by Sandstone Press.
