Les premières lignes/ the first lines :

He was born beside the sea – almost literally, for his mother's birth pangs began when she was walking along the shoreline under a pale sun gathering butterfly shells. He was born in Filey, on the east Yorkshire coast, a fishing town with a perfect sweep of pale golden beach, crumbling grassy cliffs, and the unique Filey Brigg, a mixture of many rocks, beginning at Carr Naze, and stretching out in a long peninsula into the North Sea, full of rock pools and rivulets, harsh and tempting at once. His father was an oceanographer, the son of an oceanographer who studied the deep currents of the North Sea. His mother taught English at a high school and wrote fierce little poems about waves and weather. They took him walking along the beach, and scrambling on the Brigg and fishing from rocks and with lines over the side of rowing boats.

Contenu/contents :

The narrator, an English teacher and poet who has always loved the sea, meets a girls, falls in love and sends her a love message in a bottle. The reader then follows the journey of the bottle…

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/15/as-byatt-short-story-sea