From the outset, Shark Drunk (pleasurably) triggers memories of encounters with other ‘man and the sea’ books. Of course, there is the famous one. And Moby-Dick. Then there are the classics by Strøksnes’s compatriot Thor Heyerdahl, and Mark Kurlansky’s Cod and Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler. Most splendid of all is John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez – almost a Beatnik road trip on the waves, at the beginning of which Steinbeck asks:

Why is an expedition to Tibet undertaken, or a sea bottom dredged? Why do men, sitting at the microscope, examine the calcareous plates of a sea-cucumber, and finding a new arrangement and number, feel an exaltation and give the new species a name, and write about it possessively? It would