Ebook: The outermost house: a year of life on the great beach of Cape Cod

A rediscovered classic of American nature writing: the poetic account of a solitary year observing the wild beauty of Cape Cod

With an introduction by Philip Hoare

A 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.

Transforming 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.

With its rhythmic, incantatory language and its heightened...