Shortlisted, Age Book of the Year Awards, 2012
Fishing the River of Time is an elegant meditation on nature, life and family, written with warmth and wisdom. It inspires self-reflection and an appreciation of the natural world and the fundamentals of our human experience. It is destined to become a classic work of simple living after Henry David Thoreau's Walden.
At age eighty, Tony Taylor journeys from Sydney to British Columbia to fish the Cowichan River with his eight-year-old grandson, Ned. This trip is an opportunity for Tony to return to a landscape that has had a profound effect on his life and his way of thinking, and to share this place with his grandson.
As Tony teaches Ned the patient art of fly-fishing, a lifetime of memories, thoughts and stories unspool in peaceful reflections by the water's edge.
Tony Taylor was born in 1928. He studied paleontology and petrology in London, while also working as a scientific officer at the Natural History Museum. He taught at universities in the UK and Australia before helping to set up environmental policy in British Columbia. Tony lives in Sydney.
Fishing the River of Time is his first book.
'This beautifully written book is full of warmth and wisdom and is about so much more than fishing. It is a meditation on the unspoken things that endure beyond lifetimes.' Sunday Mail Brisbane
'Where Taylor comes into his own is in his elegant unreeling of an incredible breadth of knowledge; he has an easy understanding of the world, from a 15th century fishing abbess to the geological composition of Alaska's Coast Range Batholith. It's as if he's taken the long way round" through life and, now having arrived at his destination, he's taken up residency on the porch rocking chair and is happy to share his experiences of a world which he truly respects and truly understands.' Sunday Star Times
'Taylor reels you in not by dint of great rhetorical skill but because of his romantic conviction that nature is the best teacher (rather than the university-bred sort, of which he, nevertheless, is one). More scientist and practical man than author, he knows he is swimming upstream in this literary milieu but writes with a piscine single-mindedness and an energy derived from his passion for the natural world...Taylor's book has a powerful claim on our attention as a new work in the nature writing genre....In his focus on the richness of the British Columbian wilderness, Taylor probes the mind of the place, how it lives and breathes as an immense and complex organism....Cast your line into Taylor's tale and hook something precious.' Weekend Australian
'There is much wisdom in these pages...There is little not to like about this book and I foretell it will become something of a classic...' Canberra Times
'This is the modest memoir of a remarkable man.... Taylor's elegant, reflective style flows easily between past and present. His vocabulary is a simple blend of the formal and informal, and his paragraphs are phrased with a fine attention to rhythm. The memoir is nicely shaped, meandering to a high point two-thirds of the way through when Ned arrives, and then moving to a soft inspirational ending....[Tony and Ned's] time by the river is not so much about fishing, as about searching nature for answers. This is an inspiring first book by a gentle and generous writer.' Australian Book Review
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