Moss Beach has long been a picturesque seaside place with scenic cliffs and unusual marine gardens. The town is separated from the dense San Francisco area by Devil's Slide, a moody geographical barrier of tumbling rocks that now supports U.S. Highway One. The developers of the Ocean Shore Railroad envisioned Moss Beach as one of a string of resorts along the San Mateo County coastline. The railroad did not endure, but the automobile era brought prosperity to the secluded area, which hummed with activity during Prohibition and became a strategic and controlled location during World War II. Early settler Jurgen Wienke, who built the original Moss Beach Hotel in the 1880s, would be amazed at how this little town has evolved. Abundantly endowed with natural beauty, the Moss Beach of yesterday can still be discovered today.

A beautifully written memoir of a family’s year living in Reykjavik, Iceland that “captures the fierce beauty of the Arctic landscape”—from the acclaimed author of Ghost Wall (Booklist). Sarah Moss had a childhood dream of moving to Iceland, sustained by a wild summer there when she was nineteen. In 2009, she saw an advertisement for a job at the University of Iceland and applied on a whim, despite having two young children and a comfortable life in Kent, England. The resulting adventure was shaped by Iceland’s economic collapse, which halved the value of her salary; by the eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajokull; and by a collection of new friends, including a poet who saw the only bombs fall on Iceland in 1943; a woman who speaks to elves; and a chef who guided Sarah’s family around the intricacies of Icelandic cuisine. Moss explored hillsides of boiling mud and volcanic craters and learned to drive like an Icelander on the unsurfaced roads that link remote farms and fishing villages in the far north. She watched the northern lights and the comings and goings of migratory birds, and as the weeks and months went by, she and her family learned new ways to live. Names for the Sea is her compelling and very funny account of living in a country poised on the edge of Europe, where modernization clashes with living folklore.

An indispensible guide to coastal foraging and fishing in the intertidal regions of our Northern California coast where fish, small and large, plus abalone and many other tasty items can be found