Chris Stewart shot to fame with Driving Over Lemons (9780956003805) – Sort Of Books’ launch title in 1999. Funny, insightful and real, the book told the story of how he bought a peasant farm on the wrong side of the river, with its previous owner still resident. It became an international bestseller and with its sequels – A Parrot in the Pepper Tree and The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society – it has sold more than a million copies in the UK alone. Chris prepared for life on his Spanish mountain farm with jobs of doubtful relevance. He was the original drummer in Genesis (he played on the first album), then joined a circus, learnt how to shear sheep, went to China to write the Rough Guide, gained a pilot’s license in Los Angeles, and completed a course in French cooking. Three Ways to Capsize a Boat fills in his lost years as a yacht skipper in the Greek islands. Despite the extraordinary success of his books, Chris, his wife Ana, and their daughter Chloë, continue to live on their farm, with their numerous dogs, cats, chickens, sheep and misanthropic parrot.

If you’re wondering what Chris Stewart did before he and Ana moved to El Valero, their Spanish farm, here’s one of the answers. He took to the sea, landing a job as skipper for the summer, sailing a Cornish Crabber around the Greek islands. It was his dream job – and there was just one tiny problem. He hadn’t ever sailed before and had not the foggiest how to start. In a series of madcap and hilarious adventures we follow Chris from a shaky start in Chichester harbour to his epic Odyssey to Spetses (a bucket would have been handy), and then on to the journey of a lifetime – battening down the hatches on a trip across the North Atlantic. It’s a journey crackling with Chris’s zest for life, irresistible humour, and unerring lack of foresight. Dry land never looked more welcoming.