Casting Shadows Fish and Fishing in Britain

– A Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year

"'Tom Fort's wonderful social history of angling is the ideal book for fish fanciers [...] A wonderful and unsnobbish social history of angling by a master fisherman"
– Max Hastings, Sunday Times

"'His writings cover a wide range of subjects [...] he therefore brings to this book a more practised pen than most angling writers bring to theirs"
– Literary Review

"'Casting Shadows is a beautifully written, unexpectedly humorous and fastidiously researched expression of gratitude for creatures and for a sport. Fort recreates vivid vignettes of moments in angling's heritage with novelistic flourish"
– Patrick Galbraith, The Times

"'Tom Fort's Casting Shadows [...] offers garrulous witness to a fine passion [...] [Fort] is a sort of aquatic anthropologist, an angler with an infectious curiosity about all things fishy [...] The aroma of wonder seeps through his sentences. Buried beneath the anecdote and the arcana is the poignancy of the fisherman's encounter with nature [...] A plea for attention to the radiant world"
– London Review of Books

"'Tom Fort [...] leads us into all sorts of fishy places, with their delightful sights and smells, and introduces us to rough-hewn, fishy characters – and we love it [...] His writing must give any fisherman nostalgic thoughts. Equally, any non-fisherman will surely be enticed by the scenes he depicts, and amazed by the facts of history and natural history he reveals"
– Oldie

"Marvellous"
– Jeremy Paxman, Saga Magazine

"An essential antidote to a modern world"
– Fly Fishing & Fly Tying magazine

"The ideal book for lock-down [...] Thought-provoking [...] intelligent and well researched [...] You will not be disappointed"
– Journal of the Piscatorial Society

"A fascinating, beautifully written and deeply peculiar book"
– New Scientist