the house in the waves [Import] [Hardcover]

james hamilton-paterson (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 120 pages
• Publisher: SG Phillips; 1St Edition edition (1970)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571093272
• ISBN-13: 978-0571093274
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,070,076 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the house in the waves, August 27, 2000

By 

"martineke" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The House in the Waves (Hardcover)

James Hamilton-Paterson is an author-poet who according to a '92 Vanity Fair article has quietly become one of England's greatest writers. His oeuvre is virtually unknown yet extraordinary and beautifully written. His works are wonderful, insightful and utterly engrossing.

The sea is a key element in most of Hamilton-Paterson's work. The house in the waves, a children's book written in 1970 when he was twenty-eight is about a 14 year old orphan. Martin lives in a fantasy world where nobody can enter and nothing can hurt him. The boy is slowly losing all contact with reality and is send to a special home close to the shore. He is inexorably drawn to the sea and one day runs away to find it. On his quest he finds a strange balloon with a note which starts the dark adventure which ultimately leads him out of his isolation. This is a wonderful story which can be read on many levels and I think, will specifically appeal to Harry Potter readers.

I also recommend The Great Deep, a meditation on man's relationship to the sea and the semi-autobiographical Playing with Water. William Gass wrote in his NY Times book review of the latter, "I was reminded of those intense and aimlessly happy hours spent in the pages of books before I became a professional skimmer and scanner and interpreter of texts, and how immersed my soul was in the superior spirit of another."