This beautifully written novel, the second from Ledgard (after Giraffe), a correspondent for the Economist based in Africa, tells two stories in parallel. James More, a British spy posing as a water engineer, is taken captive by jihadists in Somalia; the counterpoint to this viscerally horrific tale is his love affair with Danielle Flinders, a “biomathematician” working in the field of oceanography. The affair is related as a series of flashbacks from a recent vacation in France. The book is told in short, episodic chapters that probably reflect the journalistic sensibilities of the author, who not only captures the enormous barbarity of More’s al-Qaeda captors but also manages to convey some of their innate humanity. But there is no sentimentalizing of the evils of the jihadists, “empowered by the prospect of martyrdom” and comforted by a “medieval” fatalism. (In one horrifying scene, a young girl in Kismayo, Somalia, is gang-raped—then “convicted” of adultery by the local Muslim cleric and sentenced to death by stoning.) Danielle’s milieu, the deep ocean (which “challenges our sense of who we are and where we came from”), offers a contrast to the gruesome and misguided efforts of Islamic fundamentalism. The book is exciting in the way of a thriller, though Ledgard seems uninterested in maintaining or even developing that sense of suspense. What makes the book remarkable is its poetically rendered and remarkably intelligent glosses on Islamic fundamentalism versus the West, on Africa, and on the oceans. This may be more of a novel of ideas than a novel full stop, but it is profoundly readable and unfailingly interesting. Agent: Gillon Aitken, Aitken Alexander Associates. (Apr.)
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“Ledgard writes from deep immersion in his well-imagined characters and setting, telling a strong central story involving a terrorist hostage-taking and a perilous deep-sea dive, and deploying language at once precise and flexible . . . Submergence is a hard-edged, ultracontemporary work about people a reader cares for, apart and together, through extraordinary precarious conditions.” —New York Times Book Review
“An extraordinary fusion of science and lyricism . . . [A] darkly gleaming novel about love, deserts, oceans, lust and terror.” —Alan Cheuse, NPR
"[A] stunning novel." —The Atlantic
“Every once in a while, a critic will be mesmerized by a book that stands out from — even wipes the floor with — all other books that have come his way of late. . . . Prose merges with poetry; shocks detonate like depth charges, and characters’ fates actually matter in Submergence, an astonishing novel that utterly immerses the reader.” —Malcolm Forbes, Star Tribune
"Ledgard's Submergence offers a compelling investigation of a world (our world) in which doom and largess sit side by side. Thoughtful without being dogmatic, beautiful without being precious, it is exactly the novel we need right now."—Denver Quarterly
“What makes the book remarkable is its poetically rendered and remarkably intelligent glosses on Islamic fundamentalism versus the West, on Africa, and on the oceans….[P]rofoundly readable and unfailingly interesting.” —Publishers Weekly, boxed review
"[A]n intensive, coruscatingly beautiful book that plumbs the will to survive." —Library Journal
“Easily one of the best books I’ve ever read.” —New Hampshire Public Radio, “Summer Reads 2013 Edition”
“[James More and Danielle Flinders's] stories become dramatic explorations of conditions far larger than their individual destinies—a meditation on our species and our planet at a time heavily shadowed by the prospect of extinction.” —Philip Gourevitch, The New Yorker blog
“Submergence wonderfully superimposes two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. . . . 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.”—Wall Street Journal
“Submergence delivers with its striking understanding of terrorism and its advocates. . . . Ledgard can mesmerize like Philip Gourevitch.” —Cleveland Plain-Dealer
“Profoundly readable and unfailingly interesting, this beautifully written novel tells two stories in parallel. James More, a British spy posing as a water engineer, is taken captive by jihadists in Somalia; the counterpoint to this viscerally horrific tale is his love affair with Danielle Flinders, a ‘biomathematician’ working in the field of oceanography.” —Publishers Weekly (Best New Books, Week of March 25, 2013)
“It’s no surprise that [Ledgard] offers not just an acute portrait of a man and a woman on the edge (or dangerously submerged) but an almost defiantly intensive novel of ideas. . . . Highly recommended for thinking readers.” —Library Journal
“Offering myriad pleasures in its prose . . .[Submergence is] beautiful, and extraordinary. An ambitious work that will provoke strong reactions.” —Booklist
“[Submergence] is a tangle of rich imagery, philosophical nuggets and factual anecdotes…enough brutal and beautiful moments to make this book absorbing.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[L]aceratingly beautiful.”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
“[A] ‘must read.’ . . . 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.” —Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Daily Circuit”
“[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 a platform to finish them . . . 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.” —Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine
“[M]ore than the story of the ocean world and more than a story of love. Submergence is a meditation on nature and so, too, a contemplation of death.” —The Philadelphia Review of Books
"[Submergence] is easily my favorite book of the year." —Vol. 1 Brooklyn, "A Year of Favorites: Michele Filgate"
"A few months ago I read the very literary novel Submergence, which ends with a death so shattering it's been rattling around in my head ever since. But it also offers so much more: Weird facts, astonishing sentences, deeply unfamiliar (to me) characters, and big ideas about time and space and science and love." —Slate, "Against YA"
"[Submergence] is, variously, a love story, martyrology, heresiography, science book, and spy novel. Like its Twitter supporters, who spoke in rapturous terms, I was sucked into the novel right away, from its commanding first line — 'It was a bathroom in an unfinished house in Somalia in the year 2012?'— to its final epigraph from Horace: 'Plunge it in deep water: it comes up more beautiful.' . . . I am very enthusiastic about this novel, because I found it transporting. . . . its ecological meditations are deep, its imagery sublime." —The Millions
"J.M. Ledgard has partaken in something that will outlive him and he’s to be congratulated for writing such honest and moving prose." —Rainy Day
“[Submergence is] not only a fierce and tender love story between two people caught in two very different worlds, but also a book that, chapter by chapter, taught me something about the world. It’s also a technical achievement, with some of the finest prose I have read in a long time.” —BookPage
“In Submergence, Ledgard sets individual lives next to the huge realities of nature, balances human self-importance against planetary fragility.” —Minnesota Public Radio’s “All Things Considered”
“Though the mood of J.M. Ledgard’s Submergence is meditative, the threat of violence—both manmade and in the natural world—looms heavily. . . . Ledgard is less interested in the thriller-esque aspects of the book, and more in their philosophical implications.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn
"Elegant and assured. . . The brilliance of Ledgard is in his willingness to plead ignorance. He understands that the enormity of the universe eludes human comprehension. To encapsulate its mysteries in a massive tome would be like trying to capture moonlight in a shoebox. For Ledgard, the short novel is a tiny window that looks out onto vast landscapes."—Oyster
“Submergence is a brilliant book. It is knowledgeable not only about East Africa and oceanography, but also religion and literature. But fundamentally the book seemed to me about the necessity of recognizing our ignorance.” —Little Brown Mushroom
“This stunningly written book . . . is also a beautiful and deeply intelligent page-turner.” —Guernica, “Editor’s Picks: Heat Wave Reads”
"If you can only read one book in the next week/month/year, read this book. . . . The world as we find it — and keep finding it through exploration — is a world of surprise, a world that exceeds imagination. Submergence touches some of that sublimity." —The Mumpsimus
“This is a beautiful and heart-rending story, full of images, feelings, facts, and history . . . [Y]ou will be changed after reading this book.” —Killer Nashville
“Ledgard’s novel is an erudite exploration of going down in space—not only into the water depths of the unknown but also into equally fraught human relationships on land and man’s longing and capacity for sustaining love. . . . a rare work of beauty in the face of such a risk and terror.” —Counterpunch
"In Submergence, Ledgard marries the wonder of fact with the beauty of fiction; the result is a portrait of individual consciousness and of this strange, barely understood planet." —Quaterly Conversation
"[O]ne of those books that grabs you from the beginning and holds on . . . Submergence is a superb and timely novel, and should grace the bookshelves of every gentleman's collection. . . . An immaculately researched and cosmic piece of prose, Submergence is well worth your time." —Inspirational Aesthetics
“My faith in fiction as an art always gets revived when I’m reading a book that I can’t stay away from and whose author’s skill I look upon in awe (and some fear). . . . Submergence by J.M. Ledgard is one such book. . . . A suspenseful, thoroughly enjoyable read.” —Petite Punch
“[T]he prose is gorgeous: both thick and gossamer in the same breath. That author Ledgard can make highly scientific and deeply anthropological themes both heavy and poetic at the same time is thrilling. . . . In the end, Submergence may be one of the most unsettling books you will read in a long while.” —LitStack
"Submergence, J.M. Ledgard: like Sebald and LeCarre collaborating on a book about Cousteau." —Medium
"There are some novels that do more than just examine a life, dissect a relationship, recount an adventure. They tell you things you do not know, often things you could not know. J. M. Ledgard’s Submergence is such a novel."—j.p. bohannon
“Combining meditative beauty with brutal geopolitics, Ledgard’s extraordinary novel balances us between compassion and violence, tranquility and fear, possibility and destruction. We stare down the barrel of a gun, we feel the pressure build as we descend to the greatest depths, and we trust the touch of someone who was until very recently a total stranger. Submergence is a breathtaking vision of life stretched between its extremes. We are immersed, and we feel the weight of the world all around us.” —Elliott Bay Book Company newsletter
"Escaping into Ledgard’s language is itself a kind of submergence—the book has a vaguely liquid quality as it moves between James and Danny and between the surface and the lower depths. A strange and beautiful read."—A Working Library
“Submergence is a wondrous book – arrestingly original, inventive, expansive, vivid, and thought-provoking. Through the tautly twined stories of a British spy captured by jihadis in Somalia and a Franco-Australian marine biologist captivated by the ocean’s deepest reaches, 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
“Submergence is a masterly evocation of the intricacy of life, human and otherwise, but also of pain, pleasure, and the unknown depths. A strange and beguiling novel. The reader is pulled along by the undertow of Ledgard's intelligence.” —Teju Cole
“I’ve often dreamt of doing a work of art that resembles the experience of standing at the bottom of an empty swimming pool and physically feeling the presence of the absent water. Being inside the pool and imagining the water on your body is subtly different from thinking about the water while standing next to the pool. This difference, felt in all our senses, tells us something about how we see the world in ways that we often find hard to describe. Reading J.M. Ledgard’s Submergence is just like that. Spaces, colors, and images become tangible, and our senses explicit. We read with our body, not just with our eyes; we physically walk through emerging spaces.” —Olafur Eliasson
“Submergence is a great achievement. Moving, disturbing and hauntingly memorable.” —Norman Foster
"A powerful look at what sustains us in moments of fear and isolation, and how intense connections between people can survive even the most extreme forms of isolation."—Work in Progress
