Every day, Philip Hoare swims, either off the coast of his native Southampton or his adopted Cape Cod. He watches its daily and seasonal changes. The sea is where we came from, Hoare notes, but it is also an ending: a repository of lost ships, people, ways of being. Combining nature writing, memoir, and history, Hoare reflects on the irresistible lure of the ocean, and surveys its influence upon Melville, Thoreau, Byron, and Virginia Woolf, but also David Bowie and John Waters.