Book description
On the evening of 26th November 1703, a cyclone from the north
Atlantic hammered into southern Britain at over seventy miles an hour,
claiming the lives of over 8,000 people. Eyewitnesses reported seeing
cows left stranded in the branches of trees and windmills ablaze from
the friction of their whirling sails. For Defoe, bankrupt and just
released from prison for seditious writings, the storm struck during
one of his bleakest moments.
But it also furnished him with the material for his first book, and
in his powerful depiction of private suffering and individual survival
played out against a backdrop of public calamity we can trace the
outlines of his later masterpieces such as A Journal of the Plague
Year and Robinson Crusoe.
Richard Hamblyn is the author of the Invention of Clouds: How an
Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies, which won the
LA Times Book Prize and was short-listed for the BBC4 Samuel Johnson
Prize in 2002. He lives and works in London.
Richard Hamblyn is the author of the Invention of Clouds: How an
Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies, which won the
LA Times Book Prize and was short-listed for the BBC4 Samuel Johnson
Prize in 2002. He lives and works in London.
