Every Last Fish: What Fish Do for Us and What We Do to Them is shortlisted for the 2026 Royal Society Science Book Prize, supported by the Trivedi Family Foundation.
About the book
Cold-blooded, slippery, wet and strange: fish can be hard to think of as fellow animals and easier to consider as food. But what do we know of these creatures on our plates, and what do we know of how they got there? In Every Last Fish, Rose George takes us inside the vast legal industries that support our appetite for fish fingers and salmon sandwiches, and the equally colossal illegal fishing trade whose practices and standards are unmonitored and often dangerous. It introduces us to the men (and it is mostly men) who fish, the women (and it is mostly women) who process the flesh and strive to keep fishing communities afloat. It takes us from Alaska to Senegal, via Scotland, Norway, and Massachusetts, and from the nets on the surface to the murky depths of the sea bed. It will transform the way you look at fish and change your understanding of what lies behind the inscrutable eye that looks back at you.About the author
Rose George is a British journalist and author. She has written four non-fiction books. A Life Removed; The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters; Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry the Brings you 90% of Everything; and Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood. She graduated with a First-Class Honours BA in Modern Languages at Somerville College, Oxford in 1992 and an MA in international politics in 1994 from the University of Pennsylvania as a Thouron Scholar and Fulbright Fellow.
