Every shipwreck has a story to tell, and every shipwreck is undergoing a fundamental transformation. With artworks and stories by Neil Johnstone and poetry by Janis Freegard, this book is a meditation on those strange, liminal spaces that continue to fascinate, alchemise and promise long lost treasures. Shoreline shipwrecks are liminal spaces, and the shoreline boundary between land and sea is explored in this book (literally and as a metaphor).

In doing so the book ranges widely across various subjects, including the nature of memory as it changes over time, ecological decay, the ocean as a corrosive and transformative renewing force, colonial pasts and how they are perceived differently over time, water as corrosive force, and how that can be beautiful as well as terrible. The book features shipwrecks in Taranaki, Lyttelton, Otago, Motueka, Patea, Cornwall, and Scotland.