Submergence

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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. For James, a descendant of Thomas More, his mind escapes to utopias both imagined and remembered, to fragments of his life before his incarceration; to books read, to paintings and music that now haunt him. 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.

Submergence is a love story, a meditation on nature and mortality, and a vivid portrayal of Africa and of the secret depths of the sea. With it J. M. Ledgard proves himself a remarkable writer of large horizons and vast ambition.

IT WAS A BATHROOM in an unfinished house in Somalia in the year 2012. There was a hole in the wall where the water pipe was meant to come in and the floor sloped away to a drain where the suds were meant to flow from a shower along a trench to the dirt outside. In some future time, the shower might be fitted. In some future time, it might become an incidental place. But it was not so for him. For him, it was a very dark and specific place.

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