Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

"Variably genial, cautionary, lyrical, admonitory, terrifying, horrifying and inspiring…A lifetime of thought, travel, reading, imagination and memory inform this affecting account." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Blending history and anecdote, geography and reminiscence, science and exposition, New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester tells the breathtaking saga of the Atlantic Ocean. A gifted storyteller and consummate historian, Winchester sets the great blue sea's epic narrative against the backdrop of mankind's intellectual evolution, telling not only the story of an ocean, but the story of civilization. Fans of Winchester's Krakatoa, The Man Who Loved China, and The Professor and the Madman will love this masterful, penetrating, and resonant tale of humanity finding its way across the ocean of history.

Blending history and anecdote, geography and reminiscence, science and exposition, the New York Times bestselling author of Krakatoa tells the breathtaking saga of the magnificent Atlantic Ocean, setting it against the backdrop of mankind's intellectual evolution

Until a thousand years ago, no humans ventured into the Atlantic or imagined traversing its vast infinity. But once the first daring mariners successfully navigated to far shores—whether it was the Vikings, the Irish, the Chinese, Christopher Columbus in the north, or the Portuguese and the Spanish in the south—the Atlantic evolved in the world's growing consciousness of itself as an enclosed body of water bounded by the Americas to the West, and by Europe and Africa to the East. Atlantic is a biography of this immense space, of a sea which has defined and determined so much about the lives of the millions who live beside or near its tens of thousands of miles of coast.

The Atlantic has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists and warriors, and it continues to affect our character, attitudes, and dreams. Poets to potentates, seers to sailors, fishermen to foresters—all have a relationship with this great body of blue-green sea and regard her as friend or foe, adversary or ally, depending on circumstance or fortune. Simon Winchester chronicles that relationship, making the Atlantic come vividly alive. Spanning from the earth's geological origins to the age of exploration, World War II battles to modern pollution, his narrative is epic and awe-inspiring.

“Winchester brings a knowledge as vast and deep as his subject to this history of the Atlantic Ocean.” - Entertainment Weekly

“A rollicking ride…. No one tells a better yarn than Winchester.” - Washington Post

“Lyrical, rhetorical and historical.... Atlantic is written with a wry appreciation for history’s eventual correction of mankind’s injustices .....Informative, thoroughly engaging, often surprising and enlightening in the details it turns up.....one of Winchester’s best books.” - Louisville Courier Journal

“A joy to read.” - Portland Press Herald

“Atlantic...is at once satisying, suspenseful (no mean trick on the subject of an ocean), thought-provoking, occasionally funny, and always absorbing. So big a subject as the Atlantic Ocean requires a certain largeness of spirit, and amplitude of descriptive power, and Simon Winchester is gloriously up to the task.” - Daily Beast

“[An] epic new book... With his excellent research and engrossing anecdotes about the ocean as a ‘living thing,’ Winchester spotlights its inspiration on poets, painters, and writers in its majestic beauty... Winchester’s sea saga is necessary reading for those who want to understand the planet better.” - Publishers Weekly

“Mr. Winchester—a trained geologist and inveterate globetrotter—is well suited to tell the story. And he tells it with the sort of panache that he has brought to previous book, such as Krakatoa, about the volcanic disaster of 1883, and The Professor and the Madman,, about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary . . . . His lively, lyrical telling of the ocean’s story does much to sharpen our appreciation.” - Wall Street Journal

“Telling the story of ‘the classic ocean of our imaginings’ is a huge undertaking but Simon Winchester manages it with aplomb.” - The Economist

“In this detailed, engrossing and beautifully written book, Simon Winchester shows how the familiar sea at our front door is far more significant to the world than we ever supposed.” - Virginia Pilot and Star Ledger

“Simon Winchester has an uncanny ability to connect with readers, holding forth with the erudite charm of the fascinating dinner guest who is on everybody’s invitation list.” - Philadelphia Inquirer

“A formidable writer and storyteller.” - Entertainment Weekly

“Mr. Winchester’s latest work of nonfiction is, like the 36-pound cod my father caught 40 years ago in the deep sea two hours out of Plymouth, Mass., “a keepuh” (New England parlance)...It’s one of those you’d like to keep on a shelf for another read some time in the future.” - Baltimore Sun

“History is rarely as charming and entertaining as when it’s told by Simon Winchester. There are fabulout set pieces in Atlantic—on piracy, on packet ships, on trans-Atlantic cables and the speeding up of information, on cofish, on sea bass, on plankton.” - New York Times Book Review

“In the hands of author Simon Winchester, the ocean becomes a larger-then-life, near-eternal historical figure...Highly readable and well organized, delivering its various themes with authority...Anyone wanting an entirely new viewpoint of history should pick up Atlantic. The ocean is a mighty character with a powerful story. Winchester gives it an overdue voice.” - San Antonio Express-News

“Convincing.... A fascinating look at a long sweep of history.” - Los Angeles Times

“Winchester vividly describes how the Atlantic Ocean was born about 190 million years ago, continues to spread at the rate of about an inch a year and could well disappear as we know it in just another 180 million years.... Delightful.” - USA Today

“[A] tale about the Atlantic Ocean that is variably genial, cautionary, lyrical, admonitory, terrifying, horrifying and inspiring.... A lifetime of thought, travel, reading, imagination and memory inform this affecting account.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A fine yarn...the pages bustle with fascinating tales and a wealth of unexpected scientific and cultural detail....Winchester works to reinvest the Atlantic with the sense of wonder that it held for generations prior to ours.” - The Age (Melbourne, Australia)

“Fascinating...ingenious...exhilarating, absorbing...executed with verve and panache.... The time is not too far off, it seems to me, when books like this will seem to be infused with a poignant nostalgia, the kind of nostalgia some readers experience nowadays with Joseph Conrad’s tales of an empire on which the sun never set.” - Sydney Morning Herald

“[Simon Winchester] colours the narrative with the history of every human endeavour related to it across the centuries, from the 7th century moment when Phoenician sailors ventured past the Pillars of Hercules on to the ages of exploration, colonisation and beyond. Winchester has, it seems, stopped at nothing in order to give life to this ocean’s story.” - The Courier Mail (Australia)

Wonderful, encyclopedic....enthralling....Winchester brings us down to sea level and makes us realise what we owe to the Atlantic. - Philip Hoare, The Telegraph (London)