About the Book:

For the creators of this beautiful book, the unpredictability and drama of the weather is the connecting strand in their long-anticipated collaboration. In Gormley’s delicate and light-filled drawings of the ‘liminal realm of the north Norfolk coast’, published here for the first time, he evokes ‘the blurring of perception between solid, aerial, and liquid’, using Chinese brushes to apply ink to water-flooded paper. He reflects on the drawings ‘as one might look at the marks left by the receding flood: dried salt on a rock, or the tideline on a beach.’

Tóibín’s accompanying story, tender and deeply poetic, finds the protagonist on an Irish seashore in a torrential rainstorm that with other sights, smells and familiar phrases triggers memories of childhood summers decades earlier, when the vagaries of the weather disrupt his family’s leisurely enjoyment of the sea and the strand, as ‘the rain became hard, relentless, like something angry that had been released.’ 

About the Authors:

Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy in 1955. He is the author of nine novels including The Master, Brooklyn, The Testament of Mary and Nora Webster and House of Names. His work has been shortlisted for the Booker three times, won the Costa Novel Award and the Impac Award. He has also published two collections of stories and many works of non-fiction. He lives in Dublin.

Sir Antony Gormley is a distinguished British artist and sculptor perhaps best known for his huge Angel of the North in Gateshead. He won the Turner Prize in 1994 and has been a Royal Academician since 2003. Gormley is one of the most critically respected artists working internationally, with works that have universal resonance.

About the Publisher:

Enitharmon, founded in 1967, is an independent British publisher. They specialise in artists’ books, artworks and literary editions.