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
New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of 2013
New York Magazine #2 on The Best 10 Books of the Year
NPR Books Best Books of 2013
Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2013
Library Journal Best Books of 2013
"[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 the 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
"Easily one of the best books I've ever read."—New Hampshire Public Radio, "Summer Reads 2013 Edition"
"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. . . . [He] has given, in Submergence, glimpses of very strange life indeed: the spy in a place so lawless that chaos is the only norm, the scientist in our planet’s least knowable region, lovers expert at self-containment. Out of this, acute understandings emerge."—New York Times Book Review
"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, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"An extraordinary fusion of science and lyricism. . . . [A] darkly gleaming novel about love, deserts, oceans, lust and terror."—Alan Cheuse, NPR's "All Things Considered"
"[L]aceratingly beautiful."—Library Journal
"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
“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
"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)
"Submergence is an exploration of the present, past, and future, of how we live, and how life lives around us, unconcerned with our relatively new and parasitic species. . . . Ledgard gives us a view of the world in a way that we rarely see. He makes the tiny chemosynthetic creatures at the bottom of a poisonous sea as important as the jihadists who dominate our headlines."—Big Think
"[A]n almost defiantly intensive novel of ideas . . . Highly recommended for thinking readers."—Library Journal, starred review
"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
“[Submergence] is a tangle of rich imagery, philosophical nuggets and factual anecdotes . . . enough brutal and beautiful moments to make this book absorbing.”—Kirkus
“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
"Offering myriad pleasures in its prose . . .[Submergence is] beautiful, and extraordinary. An ambitious work that will provoke strong reactions.”—Booklist
"[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
"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
"[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 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
“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
“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
"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
"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"
"[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"
"Ledgard's novel is an erudite exploration of going down in space—not only into the watery 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 risk and terror."—Counterpunch"
"This stunningly written book . . . is also a beautiful and deeply intelligent page-turner."—Guernica, "Editor's Picks: Heat Wave Reads"
"[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 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