The Outermost House cover art

The Outermost House

A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod

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The Outermost House

By: Henry Beston
Narrated by: Brett Barry
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About this listen

 The Outermost House is a classic of American nature literature.

In 1926, Henry Beston spent two weeks in a two-room cottage on the sand dunes of Cape Cod. He had not intended to stay longer, but, as he later wrote, "I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go."

Beston stayed for a year, meditating on humanity and the natural world. In The Outermost House, originally published in 1928, he poetically chronicled the four seasons at the beach: the ebb and flow of the tides, the migration of birds, storms, stars, and solitude. The landscape was his major character, and his writing provides a snapshot of the Cape, a place physically changed yet still as soulful 80 years later.

Like Henry D. Thoreau before him, and Rachel Carson after him, Beston was a writer of stunning beauty, importance, and vision. Robert Finch once wrote of him, "His are burnished, polished sentences, richly metaphoric and musical, that beg to be read aloud."

©1928 Kate Barnes (P)2007 Silver Hollow Audio, Inc. Art & Literature Authors Ecology Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Science

Critic reviews

"A colorful and ever-changing chronicle of movement that approaches the magnificent." ( Boston Transcript)
"Clear and full of life." ( The Nation)
All stars
Most relevant
Considered, gentle, charming, informative. Beach in winter; solitary life, tiny house and off grid living.

Just wonderful

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I try to vary my reading between fact and fiction, science and the soul, the great human obsession and the (rest of the) natural world.

This book is beautiful. The author submerged themselves in a natural environment that we cannot without further destroying it. He has given us access to something pure and rhythmic and raw as far from the city or even agricultural life as you can get. Become immersed in the sights, sounds, smells and at one with the shifting landscape!

Most beautiful book

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I’m confident this is a good book & story. However the narration is so hard to listen to I can’t get into it

killed by a droid

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