Submergence

J. M. Ledgard's first novel, Giraffe, was published to great praise on both sides of the Atlantic in 2006. The Independent called it 'a masterpiece'; the Chicago Tribune said it was 'inspired'; Esquire hailed it as 'W.G. Sebald meets Milan Kundera'. Submergence is another bravura performance from this remarkable writer. This is a story with two protagonists u James More, an Englishman (he's a descendant of Thomas More) who is in Somalia, posing as a water expert in order to report on the Al-Quaeda organisation there to the Secret Intelligence Service, and Danielle (Danny) Flinders, half Australian, half French, a scientist who studies life in the very deepest parts of the ocean. They both happen to be in the Hotel Atlantic on the French coast one cold Christmas. They have a brief, intense affair, then return to their professional lives u in his case to capture by a group of al-Quaeda fighters and months of squalid incarceration, mock executions, forced marches through the badlands of Somalia, in hers to a voyage to the Greenland Sea, there to dive three thousand metres in a submersible to the deepest seabed. Ledgard's portrait of the secret depths of Somalia is instantly, shockingly convincing, while his visits to Danny's underwater world astonish with their otherness, their strange beauty. He is a writer of vast ambition, with large horizons, utterly original and hugely ambitious.