The Gospel of the Eels: A Father, a Son and the World's Most Enigmatic Fish

'What a joy! Patrick Svensson's sinuous weaving of natural history, philosophy, psychology and autobiography is as compelling and rewarding as a silver eel's return to the Sargasso Sea. I loved every moment.' Isabella Tree, author of Wilding

'Captivating . . . The Gospel of the Eels is, in the end, not really about eels but about life itself . . . Mr. Svensson mixes chapters about the eel's natural history - or, rather, the history of clumsy human attempts to understand it - with finely observed autobiographical vignettes devoted to his own childhood memories of eel-fishing with his father. From these memories, saturated with intense, sensory detail, Mr. Svensson's father emerges as a creature as magical and determined as any eel from the Sargasso Sea . . . Mr. Svensson's book is . . . full of stories and of a size just right, the size only memory and love can make: a place where secrets will always remain secrets and grief dissolves into the shimmering waters of the lake outside, the author's own Sargasso Sea, forever stocked with shiny eels, all within easy reach - yet not.' Wall Street Journal (USA)

'The Gospel of the Eels is the great fable of the identity age . . . It is about the identity of the eel, about globalization and about faith, and - though a small book - also about family and nature.' Die Welt (Germany)

'The author is brilliant at summarising one of the biggest riddles in marine biology, over which even Aristotle and Freud lost their sleep. Following eels and being surprised by their almost magical ability to slither out of the nets of science also means thinking about human knowledge and its limitations . . . A literary sensation.' La Stampa (Italy)