'The Swimmer is a wonderful, original achievement; teeming with stories, glittering with images, and experimental in form and tone' Robert Macfarlane

Roger Deakin is best known for his modern classic of nature writing, Waterlog, which frog-kicked the wild swimming movement into existence with wit, politics and poetry.

But he was not simply a dazzling writer and eccentric Englishman. He took his counterculture to the countryside in the 1970s and rebuilt a 16th century farmhouse from its oak beams up. He turned to self-sufficiency, teaching and environmentalism. He became a music impresario and made films, radio programmes and hundreds of friends from all classes. He was a polymath, an enthusiast, an adventurer, a romantic and rebel.

Delving deep into Roger Deakin's library of words, Patrick Barkham draws from notebooks, diaries, letters, recordings, published work and early drafts, to conjure his voice back to glorious life in these pages, revealing the inner life of an extraordinary man.

'A rich, strange and compelling work of creative memoir that beautifully honours and elevates the life and work of its subject' Alex Preston, Observer