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In a room with no windows on the coast of Africa, an Englishman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Posing as a water expert to report on al-Qaeda activity in the area, he now faces extreme privation, mock executions, and forced marches through the arid badlands of Somalia. Thousands of miles away on the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders, a biomathematician, prepares to dive in a submersible to the ocean floor. She is obsessed with life at the lowest strata of water. James and Danny are separately drawn back to the previous Christmas, to a French hotel on the Atlantic coast, where a chance encounter on the beach led to an intense and enduring romance. For James, his mind escapes to utopias both imagined and remembered. Danny, meanwhile, is drawn back to beginnings: to mythical and scientific origins, and to her own. It is to each other and to the ocean that they most frequently return: magnetic and otherworldly, a comfort and a threat.
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Reviews
"[T]he best novel I've read so far this year. . . . I started Submergence one afternoon, cut short a social event that evening to keep reading, stepped off a train at midnight with twenty pages left, and stood under a light on the platform to finish them . . . Submergence is a dark book, but in such an unusual sense: Ledgard turns out the lights, and everything, inside and out, begins to glow."
New York Magazine
"Every once in a while, a critic will be mesmerized by a book that stands out . . . Prose merges with poetry; shocks detonate like depth charges, and characters' fates actually matter in Submergence, an astonishing novel that utterly immerses the reader."
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Ledgard has given, in Submergence, glimpses of very strange life indeed: the spy in a place so lawless that chaos is the only norm, the scientist in our planet's least knowable region, lovers expert at self-containment. Out of this, acute understandings emerge."
The New York Times Book Review