A short book pulled from Adam Nicolson's Life Between the Tides — the whole of it crouched at the edge of a rock pool. Sandhoppers, prawns, winkles, crabs, anemones, each treated as a character with motive and history. Nicolson's premise, set down early: "The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes." Go to the rocks, he writes, and the living will say hello.