HERRING TALES

(Bloomsbury £9.99)

LAID out on a fishmonger’s slab, or rolled in oatmeal and fried, herring may not seem the most glamorous of fish.

But according to Donald S. Murray, they have strong moral views on fighting and adultery — he quotes an 18thcentury source that claimed either transgression drove the herring shoals away.

Murray grew up on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, and herring are close to his heart: ‘It was the existence of herring that dominated my home...some of my aunties had been herring girls in the Twenties and Thirties’, and the fish were praised in song.

This delightful book celebrates the strong cultural bond between herring and human, from the malodorous 16th-century Swedish delicacy, surstromming (or fermented herring) to August Strindberg’s novel, By The Open Sea — ‘the only major work in any language to feature a herring inspector as its central character’.