This ample selection of articles and essays by one of America’s most popular writers about fly-fishing begins with a moment on Michigan’s Au Sable River—the exact moment when the author lost his heart to fly-fishing. This collection chronicles a fishing life punctuated by a revealing trip with one of his grown sons and mellow reflections from a hospital bed.

This is the broadest of Nick Lyons’s books, with sections on tarpon and pike fishing in the Marquesas and in France, bass bugging on a small Connecticut pond, and trout fishing on unnamed creeks and blue-ribbon western rivers, as well as reflections on such aspects of the sport as the flies that are the underpinning of it all, the pursuit of records, the odd characters he’s met along the way, and the increasing challenge of crowds who pursue this ever-popular sport.

By turns canny, hilarious, inquiring, and philosophic, A Flyfisher’s World is an impressive addition to Nick Lyons’s important body of writing about fly-fishing.

Illustrated by: Mari Lyons