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Playing With Water by James Hamilton-Paterson is a true tale of passion and solitude on a Philippine island.

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´One June day in 1953 aged twelve I sat in a classroom and drew a map.´

The map that the young Hamilton-Paterson drew was of a tropical island, and it prefigured with uncanny accuracy the Philippine island on which, thirty years later, he would spend a full third of each year, entirely alone. It had a coral strand, a field of grass, vertical volcanic cliffs and no water. He survived by fishing and by drinking rainwater.

This is a book about a remarkable and self-sufficient writer´s ´desire to be lost´, and the journey of a conventionally educated Englishman to an island on the far side of the world that aroused in him a feeling of discovering a place he always knew. Hamilton-Paterson writes with incomparable skill about the hard beauty of the sea, of coral reefs and the animals that live in them, and about the fishermen who eke a living among the labyrinth of islands that make up the Philippines.

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A work of such genuine commitment, balanced perception and responsive passion that it will certainly be condemned to become a classic. New York Times

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James Hamilton-Paterson, 1941 in London geboren, Oxfordabsolvent und Mitglied der Royal Geographical Society, renommierter Journalist, Sachbuchautor, Lyriker und Romancier, schreibt u. a. für die "Sunday Times", das "Times Literary Supplement", den "New Statesman" und für die Schweizer "Weltwoche". Er lebt als freier Schriftsteller in Italien und auf den Philippinen.

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