Submergence

A love story, a spy story, and a vivid portrayal of Africa and the secret depths of the sea.

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 for the Secret Intelligence Service 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, half-French, half-Australian, prepares to dive in a submersible to the ocean floor. She is obsessed with the life that multiplies in the darkness of the lowest strata of water.

In their confines they are drawn back to the Christmas of the previous year, and to a French hotel on the Atlantic coast, where a chance encounter on the beach led to an intense and enduring romance. James, a descendant of Thomas More, escapes to utopias both imagined and remembered, to fragments of his life before his incarceration, to books read, to paintings and music that haunt him now. Danny is drawn back to beginnings: to mythical and scientific origins, and to her own. It is to each other and to the oceans that they both most frequently return: magnetic and otherworldly, a comfort and a threat.

Publication date: March 26, 2013

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5

Page count: 208 pages

ISBN: 9781566893190

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

J. M. Ledgard was born in the Shetland Islands. He is a political and war correspondent for the Economist and a thinker on risk and technology in emerging economies. He lives and works in Africa.

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2013

A New York Magazine Best Book of the Year

An NPR Best Book of 2013

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2013

A Library Journal Best Book of 2013

“A stunning novel.” 

—The Atlantic

“Submergence is a hard-edged, ultracontemporary work about people a reader cares for, apart and together, through extraordinary precarious conditions.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“An extraordinary fusion of science and lyricism. . . . A darkly gleaming novel about love, deserts, oceans, lust and terror.”

—NPR

“An astonishing novel that utterly immerses the reader.”

—The Star Tribune

“Easily one of the best books I’ve ever read.”

—New Hampshire Public Radio

“A meditation on our species and our planet at a time heavily shadowed by the prospect of extinction.”

—The New Yorker

“Like the depths of the ocean, there is much about this strange book that is hard to understand, which makes it all the more worthy of exploration.” 

—The Wall Street Journal

“Submergence delivers with its striking understanding of terrorism and its advocates. . . . Ledgard can mesmerize like Philip Gourevitch.”

—Cleveland Plain-Dealer

“Beautiful and extraordinary. An ambitious work that will provoke strong reactions.”

—Booklist

“Submergence masks a mind-expanding exploration of science, philosophy and history behind a story which is at once a spy thriller and a passionate romance.”

—MPR

“Strange, intelligent, gorgeously written . . . 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

“Weird facts, astonishing sentences, deeply unfamiliar (to me) characters, and big ideas about time and space and science and love.” 

—Slate

“[Submergence is] a technical achievement, with some of the finest prose I have read in a long time.”

—BookPage

“This stunningly written book . . . is also a beautiful and deeply intelligent page-turner.”

—Guernica

“Submergence, J.M. Ledgard: like Sebald and LeCarre collaborating on a book about Cousteau.” 

—Medium

“J.M. Ledgard plunges into a passionate contemplation of what it means to survive—for individuals, for cultures, for our species and for our planet—in these times.”

—Philip Gourevitch

“A strange and beguiling novel. The reader is pulled along by the undertow of Ledgard's intelligence.”

—Teju Cole

“Submergence is a great achievement. Moving, disturbing and hauntingly memorable.”

—Norman Foster