It seemed very similar to Westall's "Blitzcat" because both have protagonists who go traveling around England meeting various strangers along the way. This engrossing thriller, published in Britain before the author's death last year, takes a stretched premise and turns it into an absorbing psychological story. A wonderful coming of age book regarding a twelve year old Enlgish boy whose house and family were bombed during WWII. He's scathing, ironic, judgemental without spelling the judgements out and very, very choosy about the human creations too.

He just wants to observe and speak with people on the journey to get a sense of the places he visits.However, far too much of "The Kingdom by the Sea" was filled with boring and highly repetitive material. He won the Smarties Prize in 1989 for Blitzcat and the Guardian Award in 1990 for The Kingdom by the Sea. The chapters on the Troubles in Northern Ireland and on Scotland make up for the general negativity Thoreaux has about England, some of which is due to the recession and high unemployment in the early 1980s. Overall, another enjoyable read from Theroux and I look forward to the next of his on my list to read! He is travelling at the time of the Falkland’s War (‘this Falkland’s business’ as the people he meets are wont to say).

Back to where everything was just as it always had been, and you did things without thinking about them. Sadly, I chose badly as this is a book where I kept on wondering why he bothered to complete what seemed to be even for him a thankless and depressing endeavour. The book read just as well as a adult as it did when I was a child it is very well written and ok it's certainly not taxing to read it is definitely beautifully written and has plenty of highs and lows to keep anyone gripped. I was intrigued by his book about walking around the coast of England over a three-month period in 1982. The Kingdom by the Sea is now, of course, a period piece, and Theroux natural talent for misery and depressiveness is ideally suited to depicting the Kingdom of 1982, the time of the Falklands War, the gloomy hardships of Thatcherite depression with huge unemployment, empty hotels and closed factories, the destruction of industry, the Northern Irish 'troubles' in full bloom, the looming end of the railway network.He then travels roughly clockwise round the British coastline, mainly by train, getting as far north as Cape Wrath. Theroux speculates that it would be an impolite question in a place where so many people were on the dole. Paul Theroux's round-Britain travelogue is funny, perceptive and 'best avoided by patriots with high blood pressure. When a bomb during an air raid destroys Harry's home and kills his family, he knows that he is all alone in the world and has only himself to rely on.

First, this means he avoids major British cities, including London, Newcastle, Manchester, Oxbridge, etc. north to union with Ireland by their horror of traditional Roman Catholic doctrine on contraception. The language is beautiful, drawing the reader in with vivid descriptions that appeal to all the senses. Being his usual miserable persona, Theroux doesn't spare the locations he visits and the people he meets just because they happen to be British. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged.Some places now you'd be lucky to get change out of a fiver - that's if you even got there because of the damn traffic! The only time he seems to like what he sees is when is in the far-north of Great Britain, on the North Sea in Scotland. During his travels by train, he mourns the closings and threatened closings of all the small branch lines that reached so deep into the countryside and coast.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. So I had done the right thing in traveling the coast, and instead of looking out to sea, I had looked inland.

I have been to quite a few of the places mentioned, so it was interesting to see how much (or how little) they have changed, over three decades later. Then my optimism kicked in and decided I could not devote myself to such a boring exercise in self-flagellation.