Silver Shoals

At once history and elegy, Silver Shoals leads its readers from silent lakes to roiling seas in search of the fish on which Britain has always depended. A bracingly recounted and often melancholy quest, ending on a note of optimism.

Luke Jennings

Rangely-Wilson, an angler and East Anglian, reconnects us though this enjoyable fish-catching pilgrimage to the vast plenty of herring, cod, eel and salmon that once existed around Britain's shores and in our rivers; a plenty which can return to a significant extent if more people are conscious of that past, understand its lessons and take the common-sense steps necessary to bring abundance back again.

Charles Clover

A wonderful and important book, that from its first pages draws the reader along on a fascinating, gripping, often funny journey. It binds this wide, wise book too tightly, I think, to call it "nature writing" (whatever that is these days anyway). Many kinds of writing shoal together here - cultural history, natural history, travelogue, ecology, politics - to form a brilliant and glittering whole.

Robert Macfarlane

[Charles Rangeley-Wilson] summarises the individual fish biographers with wonderful clarity while also managing to illuminate how gloriously entangled his subjects are with human history… [a] wonderfully insightful book

Mark Cocker, New Statesman

Silver Shoals glints with lovely details… And any book that can come up with the precise date when the first pan of fish and chips was served gets my vote

Jonathan Tulloch, The Tablet

[Charles Rangeley-Wilson] is a vivid, exuberant writer, and a highly articulate and committed champion of his cause

Tom Fort, Literary Review

This is a great read for all your fishing mad and conservationist friends

Merryn Somerset Webb, Financial Times