A captivating memoir about fish, family, and connecting with the wild world around us.

Growing up on the Cambridgeshire Fens, Will Millard never felt more at home than when he was out with his granddad on the riverbank whiling away the day catching fish. As he grew older his competitive urge to catch more and bigger fish led him away from that natural connection between him, his grandfather and the rivers of his home and into large commercial fisheries catching fish after fish. That is, until the fateful day he let a record-breaking sand eel slip through his fingers and he knew that he’d not only lost the knowledge he once had, but also the original magic of those days down by the river. Something had to change. So, armed with his late grandfather's well-thumbed fishing encyclopaedia, Will set out on a quest to get back to his roots and catch some of our great forgotten fish species, hidden deep in lost waterways.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SAND EEL is at its heart the story of three generations of men trying to figure out what it is to be a man, a father and a fisherman. It plots Will's scaly stepping stones back to his childhood innocence and late granddad, and a return to the importance of understanding the truly feral through a child's eyes, when anything was possible and the wild was everywhere.

 

Will Millard is a writer, jungle explorer and BBC presenter. He spent his twenties criss-crossing the forests of remotest West Papua in search of ancient tribal trade routes, before his solo descent of a West African river, and subsequent survival from cerebral malaria was made into an acclaimed series for BBC Radio 4. Last year he lived alongside Aboriginal whale harpooners and subsistence-hunting sea-nomads as part of his maiden television series 'Hunters of the South Seas' for BBC Two. He writes regularly for Geographical, Outdoor Fitness, the Daily Telegraph and Vice magazine, communicating his enthusiasm for adventure and the planet's most isolated peoples.