Canongate will publish award-winning writer and renowned historian Alistair Moffat’s latest book, The North Sea, in hardback and ebook in November 2025, with a paperback to follow. It is Moffat’s fifth book with Canongate and it will follow his journey from the Thames valley to the Orkney islands, traversing the history of our proud sea-faring past to better understand our relationship to the sea.
As Moffat writes, the North Sea has been a maritime highway and a home to warring tribes, foreign invaders, lost civilisations and holidaymakers. Its history spans millennia, since a seismic shift sent land retreating and water rushing in. Today, the North Sea continues to rise, claiming land mass as the east coast crumbles and sinks.
Moffat takes us on an epic, sweeping history from the white cliffs of Dover to flooded homes, crossing wild fenland and Brexit fault lines, visiting well-worn seaside towns and windswept island monasteries. The story he tells is one of newcomers and the mark they left, of Roman invasions, the arrival of the Saxons and the Viking raids. But it is also a story of those they met, of Pictish citadels and Orcadian stone circles. It is a story of technological advancement, of submarine engineering and weather forecasting. It is a story of huge industry, from whaling expeditions and fishing trawlers to the boom of North Sea oil and offshore wind farms. This is the story of how the North Sea shaped us and will continue to do so; it is above all a story of insistent, inescapable change.
Alistair Moffat commented: ‘Contrasts appeared at every turn of my 800-mile journey along the edge of Britain, a place I’d come to believe was not peripheral but central to our sense of ourselves in this scatter of islands on the north-west edge of Europe. Fish and chips, Billy Butlin and seaside fun of all sorts formed one side of the story, and on the obverse was the fatal storm surge of 1953, the sheer malice of the sea and the magnificent response of the mighty Thames Barrier. There had also been a developing sense of a common North Sea culture, from Kent to Shetland. Perhaps that was most evident where the narrative turned to the nature of the sea itself, its fishermen and sailors, its ships, lighthouses and harbours. And the long, sustained – even heroic - effort to predict its weather. The story of the North Sea, our sea, turned out to be a defining story of Britain.’
Alistair Moffat was born in Kelso, Scotland in 1950. He is an award-winning writer, historian and former Director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Director of Programmes at Scottish Television. He is the founder of the Borders Book Festival.
alistairmoffat.co.uk
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