Conville & Walsh

Conville & Walsh are delighted to announce that Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s second book, The Wavewatcher’s Companion, has been longlisted for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize for Science Books.

Gavin’s first book, The Cloudspotter’s Guide, which spent months in the UK top 10 bestseller lists. But then, one bright February afternoon on a beach in Cornwall, Gavin Pretor-Pinney took a break from cloudspotting and started watching the waves rolling into shore. Mesmerised, he wondered where they had come from, and decided to find out. He soon realised that waves don’t just appear on the ocean, they are everywhere around us, and our lives depend on them. From the rippling beats of our hearts, to the movement of food through our digestive tracts and of signals across our brains, waves are the transport systems of our bodies. Everything we see and hear reaches us via light and sound waves, and our information age is reliant on the microwaves and infrared waves used by the telephone and internet infrastructure.

From shockwaves unleashed by explosions to torsional waves that cause suspension bridges to collapse, from sonar waves that allow submarines to ‘see’ with sound to Mexican waves that sweep through stadium crowds...there were waves, it seemed, wherever Gavin looked. But what, he wondered, could they all have in common with ones we splash around in on holiday? By the time he made the ultimate surfer’s pilgrimage to Hawaii, Gavin had become a world-class wavewatcher, although he was still rubbish at surfing. And, while this fascinating, funny book may not teach you how to ride the waves, it will show you how to tune into the shapes, colours and forms of life’s many undulations.

The Winton Prize judges praised The Wavewatchers Companion for being ‘a lovely, eccentric book filled with fascinating science that takes apart all elements of waves.’

The ‘Science Books Prize’ was originally established in 1988 with the aim of encouraging the writing, publishing and reading of good and accessible popular science books. The prize is open to authors of science books written for a non-specialist audience. Books submitted for the prize must have been published for the first time in English during 2010 and be available to buy in the UK. Authors of the shortlisted books each receive £1,000 and the winner receives £10,000. The shortlist will be announced on 27 September 2011.

You can buy the book from Waterstone’s, Amazon and other bookshops now.