Deep Water

Deep Water is a reckoning with humankind’s complex relationship with the oceans, which created, shaped, and sustain not just human life, but all life on Earth. This thrilling work blends history, science, nature, and environmental writing as acclaimed author James Bradley explores the deepest recesses of the natural world. From the atomic creation of the oceans to the wonders contained within—like schools of fish that use electromagnetic sensing to migrate across the globe—Bradley unveils the ocean’s mysteries while interrogating the environmental catastrophe already impacting our lives.

Celebrating the ocean’s glories and the extraordinary efforts of scientists and researchers currently unlocking its secrets, Deep Water offers vital new ways of understanding humanity’s place on our planet and reveals that the oceans might yet save us all.

About the Author

James Bradley is a writer and critic whose books include the novels Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist, Clade, and Ghost Species; a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus; and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. His fiction has won or been shortlisted for numerous Australian and international literary awards, while his nonfiction has been twice shortlisted for the Bragg Prize for Science Writing and nominated for a Walkley Award. He won the Pascall Award for Australia’s Critic of the Year in 2012 and is currently an Honorary Associate at the Sydney Environment Centre at the University of Sydney.

Praise for Deep Water

“Bradley vividly conveys the awe-inspiring scale of the deep seas, both in space and time. Celebrating our blue planet and highlighting the perils it faces as a result of our own greed and ignorance.” — Philip Ball, The Guardian

“No part of the Earth system is more vital to the human past and future than the world ocean, and few indeed are better qualified to tell its stories than James Bradley. A love letter and a warning, Deep Water is a work of rare scholarship, wide range, and fierce urgency.” — Caspar Henderson, author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

“Deep Water is a major achievement; a vast fathoming of the pasts, presents, and futures of the world’s oceans and seas. Bradley’s skills both as novelist and essayist converge here to create this wise, compassionate, and urgent book, characterised throughout by a clarity of prose and a bracing moral gaze that searches water, self, and reader.” — Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland