To write a message in a bottle, or a story for an imagined reader, both are labours of love, sent out without guarantee in the hope they might one day be found and read. I do hope Sally's message is found and read by many - I've no doubt they'll be better off for it * Books From Scotland * Sally Huband is from "Port Zed" as I knew it, growing up a little further down the coast/estuary from her. By stages she ends up in a more stereotypically sea connected Shetland, not on some writerly whim or personal therapeutic endeavour but for the prosaic "moving with husband's job". Sea Bean is a message in a bottle. An interconnection of our oceans, communities and ourselves, and an invitation to feel belonging when we are adrift. About This Edition ISBN: There are many beautiful and poignant passages where she connects with others whose lives intersect with hers through the shoreline’s secrets — a wise woman in her chair overlooking the bluster of the ocean completely unruffled by heavy gales; another regaling how as a child she climbed out of her window with her sister to walk precarious jagged clifftops, which lingers long after reading. Huband is a great observer — she is as fascinated with characteristics and the granular detail of people as she is the energies of the shoreline. Her observations are often dreamlike and poetic and capture the essence of someone so much you can almost feel you are stood a few feet away from them. Moving to Shetland changed all that. She arrived in the islands in 2011 after spells in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, relocating with her helicopter pilot husband and their infant son. In Shetland the seas rage, the winds blow hard, and the haar can drop fast and hang around for days. She didn’t need a map to tell her she was nearer Stavanger than London, and as anyone who has been there knows the cultural and linguistic bonds between the archipelago and its northern neighbours are deep and abiding. “Shetland is quite a remarkable place, one of these places where myth and folklore feel very possible. It’s such a remarkable seascape and landscape that your mind is more easily opened to this otherworldly element.”

Like so many of its type, it begins with a move from the city to somewhere remote. Sally, her infant son and husband move from Aberdeen to Shetland when he’s offered a job flying helicopters to and from the Mainland. They’re swept away by the romantic dream of island life: the freedom, wilderness, community and – most importantly – the house prices. It is a ‘shiny lure of nature’. ‘Lure’, here, is auspicious, and it doesn’t take long for the illusion to be shattered. Biblical winds, electricity shortages and a freedom which soon reveals itself as isolation mean their first few years are a torture. For Sally, especially so. Already ‘unmoored’ by motherhood before their arrival, she quits her job in conservation in the belief she’ll find part-time work on the Isles. She doesn’t. The struggle of caring for a baby on an unforgiving, unfamiliar island surrounded by a ‘hostile’ sea is exacerbated when she suffers two miscarriages. When she manages full term at the third time of trying, the strain put upon her body is so severe that it triggers the onset of inflammatory arthritis, ending forever her dream of walking all along the island’s shoreline. She is bereft, unable to work and unsure of herself or her place. This is a book I’ve been anticipating for a couple of years. I think I first heard about it via Stephen Rutt, a nature writer I greatly admire; if he was enthusiastic, I was intrigued. Around the same time, I came across a couple of Huband’s pieces in anthologies, such as Antlers of Water, and was properly hooked. She’s a remarkable writer – it’s no surprise that she won a Scottish Book Trust new writers award in 2017. Part of that award was mentorship from Sara Maitland, another writer I have a lot of time for; it’s another link in the chain of connections which characterise this book. A perfect place to hunt the elusive sea bean, in other words. And does Huband find one? Yes, eventually. She had it with her when she took her sea kayak on its maiden voyage recently, she tells me. In 2011 Huband moved with her family to Shetland during the first of the autumn storms that would pound the islands all winter long. Two years later, her second child was born on the islands, but during the pregnancy, the base of Sally's spine was damaged and the pregnancy also triggered the onset ofautoimmune disease. AsHuband's relationship with her body changed, she took to wandering the many strandlines of the archipelago to see what the sea had washed up.

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This is a book with real heart. As she scours the coastline of her wild island home, Huband shows us not only the delights of hunting for treasure amongst the detritus, but also the horrors of climate change in real time. It will change the way I look at beaches forever Lulah Ellender This is in many ways a lovely, interesting and well written book... which sometimes set my teeth on edge. Frequently this was to do with odd repetitions of words, although it starts on the beautiful cover with the title and the image (it's not a sea bean). I think you'd be disappointed not to encounter lots of local language in a book like this but it felt weird to have 'bonxie' italicised every time it appears... I rather suspect more people now know these challenging birds as bonxies than as great skuas. I felt that 'palindromic rheumatism' was repeated in full almost like an incantation - this being the unusual form of arthritis which she develops following the birth of her second child and which constrains her activities.

Sea Bean is a message in a bottle. An interconnection of our oceans, communities and ourselves, and an invitation to feel belonging when we are adrift. This book feels important — not only is its author incredibly skilled, but she offers a wider discussion around disability, mental health, motherhood, and how we are as humans no less vulnerable than our counterparts in “the wild”. Perhaps a timely reminder of how you occupy your time out there in the world, and crucially how we adjust our focus towards others outside of our own frames of experience. As Melissa Febos writes in Bodywork of her own biographical writing, it too feels here as if Huband’s writing is ‘ an act of resilience’. With no rheumatology care available on Shetland during the pandemic, the last few years have been especially hard. On top of that, Huband caught Covid-19 early on which triggered a bad relapse. Too often, her beloved beaches became unreachable. “I’m just starting to get it managed again, so it has been a long two years,” she says.

desperate reader

What a beautifully loving and hopeful book this is. It’s a very personal story, it is also an ode to our natural world and blasts a warning of the environmental change being experienced in everyday life. Author Sally Huband and her family move to the islands of Shetland, there she struggles after pregnancy with a chronic illness, and begins to form a beautiful bond with the natural world she discovers around her. Her search for a sea bean, an almost magical charm, widens her awareness of herself and her surroundings. She is open and honest and articulate, I also felt connected to her vulnerability and strength which come into play in the most challenging of times. Focusing on change, both personally and within the environment, this a story of despair and love and hope. There is a stark reality to be found here within the natural world, she clearly talks of the impact of plastic in our oceans, the loss of species, weather transformations, and more, ensuring that thoughts aren’t easily turned away from catastrophic changes our world is experiencing. Living in the islands, being a part of the community, communicating with like-minded people, experiencing the love of family, and being able to step into nature, all of these things bring her closer to understanding her body, mind, and ability to accept or attempt to make changes. Chosen as a LoveReading Star Book, Sea Bean is an incredibly intimate yet also immensely thought-provoking and powerful introduction to Sally’s inner world, the islands of Shetland and beyond.

Sally Huband's Sea Bean is the first of these hits - it will easily be one of my books of the year, but more than that, it's one of a handful of things that I've read early or in proof and felt that it's something special. I hope my instinct is right on this one too. Sea Bean is a beautifully brave book about finding one's place in an uncertain world. For Sally Huband that place is the Shetland shoreline, where her extraordinary beachcombing finds in times of limiting illness connect her to the greater waters of wild wonder, ecological grief and the possibilities of community. It's a profoundly illuminating journey through the seas that ultimately encircle us all. But what makes this journey so special is that its movement comes from waiting; it emerges from the great patience and care needed to uncover the stories that are washed ashore from elsewhere. Sea Bean will change the way you look at the world's coasts -- Julian Hoffman SEA BEAN is a coastal treasure. Its hard-won attentiveness shows the wonder and vulnerability of our interconnected oceans, wildlife and people. In Sally's writing, beachcombing - an old island pursuit - is modern, revealing and restorative. The next time I am at the shore I will have a deeper appreciation and curiosity -- Amy Liptrot The way Huband writes about undoubtedly difficult things is matter of fact and honest. I’d say brave, but that has a condescending ring to it which feels wrong to me. Unselfish might be a better description, as the more personal episodes seem to me to be shared in the spirit of letting others know they are not alone if they’ve felt the same.A naturalist and conservationist by trade, Huband was born in Portishead near Bristol in England’s south-west. Her childhood views were of a coal-fired power station and a chemical works, and beyond that the sluggish Severn Estuary. But although she grew up by the sea she says she didn’t feel “any mythical or uncanny connection with it. I just found it quite terrifying really. It was just miles of endless sinking mud.” Sea Bean is a coastal treasure. In Sally's writing, beachcombing - an old island pursuit - is modern, revealing and restorative. The next time I'm at the shore I will have a deeper appreciation and curiosity'. Amy Liptrot. It would be easy to mistake this book as one of wistful reflections on the tide from its title. Huband avoids over sentimentalisation of the human pull to the sea edge, and never falls into cliché or superfluous prose. She is discerning, justifiably ireful at times, restless, and questing. Her words invigorate, feel rhythmic and relay a clear sincerity and integrity. A line of dead seabirds scattered along the coastline catapults her into action, and she learns to respect the limitations of her body that she no longer recognises alongside the burgeoning realities of climate erosion’s impact on the shores she haunts. Her determination to seek out an elusive Sea Bean is a talismanic quest of her will not to yield to stagnation that instead yields her to hope in the bitter winds of change. Though I never felt this in words, it reminded me that there was a way out, that there was a way to make my suffering useful. Beautiful even.’ — Melissa Febos