Rave reviews for Philip Hoare’s Albert and the Whale
ALBERT AND THE WHALE, an illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea by award-winning author, Philip Hoare, has received outstanding reviews since its publication.
In ALBERT AND THE WHALE, Philip Hoare sets out to discover why Albert Dürer's art endures. With its wild and watery adventures, its witty accounts of amazing cultural lives and its delight in the fragile beauty of the natural world, the book offers glorious, inspiring insights into a great artist, and his unerring, sometimes disturbing gaze.
‘In Albert & the Whale he leads his readers off on a marvellously varied, vividly imaginative, seductively digressive adventure that traces the path of another colossus…this is a book to immerse you’ - The Times, Book of the Week, Rachel Campell-Johnston
‘Magnificent new book … Hoare’s feeling for Dürer exceeds anything I have ever read … his greatest work yet’ - Observer, Book of the Week, Laura Cumming
‘Marvellous, unaccountable book. This is a book like the stomach of a whale: capaciously ready to accommodate whatever disparate stuff comes its way… Hoare’s modern encyclopedism also allows us to wallow in the book’s fluidity, the unpredictability of which disrupts everything, transmuting whatever is steeped in it into something rich and strange' - Literary Review
‘Philip Hoare, best know for Leviathan, his discursive and personal book about whales, has written a very Sebaldian new book. In it, he traverses his own patch and sniffs out an assortment of seemingly unrelated themes – Albrecht Durer, cetaceans, Thomas Mann and David Bowie, a deformation of the hand, the death of his mother – and proceeds to reveal the single degree of separation between them… Enlightening’ Michael Prodger, Sunday Times
‘Visionary: a tone poem put together from the lives of others, with detailed use of archives’ - Financial Times
Philip Hoare is the author of six works of non-fiction, including LEVIATHAN OR, THE WHALE (Fourth Estate, 2008), which won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Most recently, THE SEA INSIDE (Fourth Estate, 2013) was published to great critical acclaim.
ALBERT AND THE WHALE was published in the UK by Fourth Estate on 4th March 2021.
