'At a time when the public debate on religious faith seems to be more about conviction and ideology than about doubt and ambiguity, this book offers a personal and often moving account of the value of uncertainty. Alex Wright observes the beauty of the physical landscape and combines observation and reflection with memories of human turmoil. His unfolding narrative will take you gently inside yourself.' - Mona Siddiqui, OBE, Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies, University of Edinburgh';'John Henry Newman once sought to comfort a bereaved friend by noting how the dead can seem more real to us than when they were alive, more present in their absence than when in the flesh. This apparent paradox - of presence in absence - is the theme of Alex Wright's remarkable book. It is a book of bereavements, personal and cultural. Wright weaves together a set of reflections on the loss and remaining of faith in our times with the loss of his first marriage, setting both in the landscape - the seascape - of the North Norfolk coast. For it was there that his marriage both flowered and faded, in a place where the distinction between land and sea is both lost and remembered in the ceaseless flow of the tides. There is a revelation in the sea's withdrawing, a renewal in the passing of relationships, and it is the finding of such returns that Wright's book delivers: a calm, cultured, beguiling - if sometimes unsettling - meditation that will resonate with many, in many different ways. A wonderful and profound book.' - Gerard Loughlin, Professor of Theology, Durham University
