Submersion

Book that inspired the film of the same name, directed by Wim Wenders and starring Alicia Vikander and James McAvoy

On the coast of Africa, in a windowless bathroom, Englishman James More is held hostage by jihadist fighters. Posing as a hydraulic engineer to report information on al-Qaeda activities in the region, he endures extreme deprivation, torture, and forced treks across the Somali wilderness.

Thousands of kilometers away, in the Greenland Sea, biomathematician Danielle Flinders prepares to descend to the seafloor in a submersible. She is obsessed with the life forms that thrive in the darkest, deepest corners of the ocean.

Both are drawn by memories of the previous year's Christmas, to a hotel on the Atlantic coast, a chance encounter on the beach that led to an intense romance. In captivity, James's mind takes him back to that week in France and to the utopian world of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. Danny's thoughts, as he prepares to submerge once more, are also transported to the beginning of everything—to the beginning of life according to myth and science, to his own origin. And it is always to each other that their minds return—and to the ocean: a powerful magnetism, a peaceful yet threatening environment.