Sea Marked

<p><strong>A memoir of place, memory and motion, of seafarers, and the author’s connections to them and to the sea.</strong></p><p>Linda Cracknell’s quest to learn more about her seafaring family history brings her to a blustery harbour. As she throws a line to pull in a boat, she is struck by the parallel with her mission to reel the past closer to the present, to find her place in a family tree full of mariners whose lives were defined by the ebb and flow of tides.</p><p>Exploring coastlines from Scotland to Cornwall by boat and foot, she retraces the footsteps and paths of her ancestors across marshes, clifftops and waves. She travels in a 121-year-old sailboat and helps to build a community rowing boat. Gradually, she understands that the women in this story were the linchpins of the coastal communities they lived in – and the undertow of her own identity. All the while, she is untangling her complex relationship with her mother.</p><p>What begins as a quest for legacy takes Linda well beyond, as she discovers something more elemental and unconscious in her pull to the sea, imagining her blood as salt-saturated, <em>sea-marked</em>.</p>