Books by Libby Purves

Libby Purves, well known author and broadcaster, puts her finger right on the nub of what makes cruising so enjoyable, so amusing and so exasperating in her popular column in Yachting Monthly. Here, by popular request, she has gathered together the best of those pieces in a highly entertaining collection called This Cruising Life. With great gusto, and with her tongue firmly in her cheek Libby addresses such vital cruising issues as the chronic pessimism of pilot books, the power of prayer to mend cracked fuel pipes, and the inadvisability of furry leopardskin upholstery. She also admits to various disturbing personal habits connected to inflatable dinghies, ropes' ends, answering small-ads from strange men, and falling asleep on office carpets. Illustrated with Mike Peyton's witty and well loved cartoons, this book is a must for all yachtsmen - buddin, intrepid or armchair. Best known as a novelist, journalist and broadcaster, Libby Purves has in fact preferred sailing to almost everything else ever since she was picked up off the end of a pier in Ireland while working as a teenage barmaid. She crewed on a wide and sometimes alarming variety of yachts when young and broke, and for the last two decades has been sailing a series of boats ranging from a GRP gaffer to a classic wooden yawl with her husband Paul Heiney and whichever of her children and friends can be bribed or backmailed to join them. The family sailed round Britain when their son and daughter were five and three years old, a voyage immortalised in the classic One Summer's Grace. The latest family boat is a 36-foot ketch.