Rough Edges: Where Land Meets Water – The Untold Stories of Coastline Communities Author: Natasha Carthew ISBN-13: 9781399740586Publisher: SceptreGuideline Price: £20Rough Edges is a study of the British coast from the perspective of a writer, Natasha Carthew, who grew up in a Cornish fishing village, and has since moved to Ireland. Her Cornwall is not the province of surfers, paddlers and fish-shacks. It is a string of peripheral places to which local communities cling, storm-battered by politics, economics and a volatile weather. Carthew describes this changing terrain in context of her own coming to awareness of the historical depth, and continuing unfairness, of a society that relegates large sections of its population to generationally diminished opportunity. At times this makes the book a challenging read, the evident injustices of modern England and Wales in particular framed by pages of statistics, reports and interviews that submerge Carthew’s own lived experience. When the book looks up and out, it is a powerful synthesis of perspective and self-determination. When it looks around and about, it is less so. The coast is of the substance of English political identity, at least in the abstract. Brexit promised to reclaim “our seas”, an idea Carthew wonders at as she passes vacant holiday homes and winter caravan parks, temporarily occupied by the poor. The co-ordinates of the separatist fantasy have found their negative energy in the vulnerable bodies of migrants, populations Carthew connects in their disenfranchisement to coastal people who have learned to subsist. This is one of those points where echoes with contemporary Ireland bear reflection, as do Carthew’s observations of the effects of poverty on coastal towns and cities, in drugs, a lack of educational opportunity and in access to resources, from mental health to local employment. Thinking about Ireland from the coast in, and not Dublin out, might make us think differently about population and access, and move us on from a sense of statehood that is in general need of renovation. I thought of this as I read Rough Edges, not least since British king Charles III recently opened a coastal path that, when finished, will traverse 2,700 miles of England’s coastline. That the Crown owns about half of it, and that access is a gift, underlines the distance there is between the causes of inequality and their common understanding. Natasha Carthew’s Rough Edges is an alternate line to follow, in the company of people more often passed by in silence.