A Year of Small Boats: Dinghies, punts, and the people who love them

Edwin Marsh

You will spend a year among dinghies and punts, the kind of small boats that ask you to slow down. Edwin Marsh writes about the people who tend them: sanding varnish at dawn, poling through reeds, learning to trust the current. Rowan Whitmore reads in a voice that feels like morning light on water, steady and unhurried, with pauses that let you notice the lap against wood. Each chapter returns you to the same boats through the seasons, so you feel the restlessness settle, then the hurry creep back, then the relief of one stroke, then another. The sound design carries birdsong, oarlocks, and the particular hush of a punt parting reeds. Settle in and let the year unfold.