More Primer Than Deep Dive. I read George’s (nearly 20 yr old now) The Big Necessity near the start of 2025, so beginning the ending of 2025 with her latest release seems appropriate, right? 😉 Like Necessity, this book takes George to several different places to talk to several different people and chronicle their lives and thoughts on the subject at hand – in this case, commercial fishing. Unlike Necessity, here George mostly stays in and around the British Isles, with a few ventures into other European areas such as Norway.
The overall text here is essentially 15 different essays, one per chapter, using wherever she is and whoever she is talking to for that chapter to glance at the history of that chapter’s focus before primarily looking to what is currently going on in that area. There is little to no overall narrative beyond “I want to look at as much about commercial fishing in and around the United Kingdom as possible.”
And yet, for what the book is, it absolutely works and works well. You’re going to learn a little about a lot here, even as George has her own distinct editorial thoughts. On those, your mileage will absolutely vary, but George does a seemingly solid job of presenting the issues at hand in a mostly even-ish manner and never treating those she is profiling in the given chapter as anything less than fully human – for good and not so good.
No, where the star deduction comes here is the just-too-short bibliography, clocking in at 12% of the overall text, at least in my Advance Review Copy, and thus coming in just shy of the 15% or so I expect to see even with my more recent more relaxed bibliographic standards. Had George been more forceful or more novel, the Sagan Rule might have applied, but I don’t think the text here warrants that particular application – through the vast majority of the text, George is relating what she personally sees as well as what those she is profiling have directly seen as well.
Overall a solid primer on the issues surrounding commercial fishing, at minimum in and around the United Kingdom, and something a lot of us will learn a fair amount from reading.
Very much recommended.
This review of Every Last Fish by Rose George was originally written on November 13, 2025.