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I WRITE with a view of the sea. It is both a restful and restless sight, with yachts, speedboats and paddleboards traversing it and the movement of the water discernible.

Sitting hazily on the horizon are the cliffs of the Isle of Wight. When I finish, I hope to go for a long swim.

Ahead of our holiday, I had been feeling a bit forlorn to not be boarding an ocean-going vessel myself to visit foreign parts. But for a keen swimmer and completist, like me, there are compensatory delights to a staycationing summer: by the end of August, I should have swum in the Atlantic and North Sea, as well as the English Channel.

In The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, it is a romantic idea of the sea — and himself — that has drawn celebrity actor Charles Arrowby to Shruff End, a damp, unattractivesounding solitary house with Martello Tower, to write an autobiography of sorts. Vain, self-regarding, prissy and dangerously selfdeluding, Arrowby has moved there to pursue what quickly seems a false vision of himself as some sort of monastic aesthete.

Arriving in May, he swims regularly, but cuts himself trying to clamber out onto the rocks. He makes lavish, but eccentric meals for one, washed down with the better part of a bottle of wine. Gazing at the seascape, he writes: ‘How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.’

Fresh bereavement, but also the churning haunting of a past trauma, draws art historian Max Morden back to the scene of his childhood Irish holidays in John Banville’s Booker-winning The Sea.

‘I would not swim again, after that day,’ the reader learns almost immediately of the widower renting a room in a house where, many years ago, the glamorous Grace family spent an ill-fated summer.

Few seaside settings are drawn as alluringly as the Italian Riviera scenes of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley. But here, for rich American Dickie Greenleaf, the glittering sea proves less fickle and treacherous than the company he keeps. Swim safely this summer.