Another cantankerous Englishman, another one of a kind. If you’ve heard of Malcolm Lowry you’ll know him for his novel, Under the Volcano, which in fact is only one element in what he regarded as an ongoing cycle of work, the ‘Voyage That Never Ends’. His constantly reworked, and sometimes lost, manuscripts, travelled with him on his travels from Merseyside to New York and Mexico and Canada, and back to England where he died in 1957. This free-wheeling account of his time living in a fisherman’s shack on the shores of Burrard Inlet, north of Vancouver, is truly life-affirming.

Collected in Hear Us O Lord in Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, published posthumously, Lippincott, 1961