Casting Back: Sixty Years of Writing and Fishing

In Casting Back, McMullan moves from his childhood and early journalism in Northern Ireland through a lifetime of angling that eventually takes him to British Columbia and New Zealand. His earliest quarry included pike, bream, roach, tench and perch before he turned increasingly to brown trout, Atlantic salmon and the traditions of fly fishing.

After moving to British Columbia in the 1970s, Pacific salmon and steelhead opened an entirely new fishing world. McMullan's recollections range from slipping away from boarding school before dawn to fish for tench to encounters with bears, commercial fishers, Irish rivers and western Canadian waters. Across those settings, fishing becomes a thread connecting different stages of his life and the places in which he has lived.

The result is a literary fishing memoir shaped as much by migration, memory and place as by tackle and technique, tracing how an angler's relationship with water changes across decades and continents.