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Author: Visit Amazon's J.M. Ledgard Page
ISBN : 0224091379
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Submergence is an example of an emerging genre: postmodern literary airport fiction. Offering myriad pleasures in its prose, it is studded with references and takes a nonlinear, episodic approach to a story featuring glamorous James More, an English spy and descendant of Sir Thomas More, and Danielle “Danny” Flinders, of Martinique and Australia, a sexy oceanographer and biomathematician. They meet and fall in love at a small, charming European hotel just before Christmas. As the tale begins, More is a prisoner of jihadists in Somalia, while Flinders is on a scientific mission on the Greenland Sea, exploring deep-sea vents. As Ledgard, author of Giraffe (2006) and an Africa-based correspondent for the Economist, tacks between widely divergent experiences, delightful essayistic digressions erupt. At times the story becomes superfluous, an armature for rhapsodies about the ocean, the desert, ideology, and the meaning of life. Ledgard strikes all the octaves on the keyboard. The result is a novel that is at once silly in the James Bond mode, beautiful, and extraordinary. An ambitious work that will provoke strong reactions. --Michael Autrey
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"An ambitious narrative that is stark, serene and contemplative...There is no disputing that Ledgard is an elegant, determinedly intellectual and disciplined writer, yet there is also immense humanity in this novel, which deserves to be one of the strongest challengers for this years' Man Booker Prize. It is the kind of novel that wins awards, and if it does so it will be because it deserves it...Here is an artist's novel that achieves the ultimate goal of any writer: it makes us pause and think, and think again." Irish Times "JM Ledgard's eclectic and philosophical novel ranges far wider than this latest manifestation of the 'war on terror'... Ledgard creates a prose poem of ideas and images that hops and flits with inspiration." Metro "Submergence succeeds, and is immensely pleasurable, because Ledgard's magnetic north - though incessantly insisted on - is such an uncanny, inhuman and deathly place." New Statesman "Submergence is frequently beautifully written, and ensnares the reader in a forceful, hard-driving narrative...If there's any justice in the world this novel will at least be nominated for a major literary award." The Scotsman "It's the only fiction I've read in the last few years that has left me open-mouthed." Word Magazine
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Books with free ebook downloads available Epub Submergence Hardcover – International Edition
- Hardcover: 208 pages
- Publisher: Jonathan Cape (August 22, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0224091379
- ISBN-13: 978-0224091374
- Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
Epub Submergence – International Edition
This novel simply leapt off the table in the bookstore where I picked it up. There was something so audacious about coupling the story of a British spy captured by jihadists in Somalia with that of a beautiful mathematician of mixed race studying the lowest depths of the ocean. And a recommendation on the cover from Teju Cole, author of the remarkable OPEN CITY. He is right, too: "A masterly evocation of the intricacy of life" is pretty precisely what this book aims to be. A polymath's playground, it will appeal to the many who love to connect art to science, philosophy to reality, renaissance literature to the modern world. Unfortunately, the one kind of connection that matters most to me in a novel, that between human beings, is where the author is weakest.
Ledgard's technique is to write in short sections of rather dry declarative prose, from one paragraph to several pages. Some of these introduce odd historical or scientific facts, apparently out of the blue, but all connecting in some way to the author's complex world view. Most, however, concern one or both of the protagonists, jumping around over the course of about a year; it is left to the reader to work out the real-time sequence. James More, a distant descendant of Sir Thomas More, is an ex-paratrooper now working for the Secret Intelligence Service; based in Kenya, he poses as a water engineer while tracking Al Quaeda in neighboring Somalia. Professor Danielle Flinders, oceanographer, biologist, and mathematician, is the daughter of an Australian father and French Caribbean mother. She is an academic high-flyer and sexual adventuress -- until she meets James at an exclusive hotel on the French coast and they fall in love.
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