Gavin Maxwell: A Life
Douglas Botting1993

The life of the man who wrote Ring of Bright Water. This is the first full length biography of Gavin Maxwell - a tour de force, as evocative of the places and creatures in Maxwell's life as of the man himself.

Never had the simple life been pursued by so complicated a character. Grandson of the Duke of Northumberland, Maxwell never knew his father, (killed in battle in 1914) the year of his birth.His childhood spent at the isolated Scottish ancestral home of Elrig and his wartime training SOE agents in survival techniques he later took up shark hunting on the Hebridean isle of Soay - the subject of his first book, Harpoon at a Venture. It was the explorer Wildfred Thesiger who introduced Maxwell to otters in the Tigris Marshes of Iraq. Ring of Bright Water, his classic account of life with otters brought him worldwide fame as an outstanding writer and a latter day eccentric int he grand manner.

The book is illustrated with maps and photographs.