Deep Water:
The World in the Ocean
Overview
Oceans created, shaped, and sustain not just human life, but all life on Earth, and perhaps beyond it. Deep Water is a reckoning with humankind’s complex relationship with these oceans.
In this thrilling work — a blend of history, science, nature, and environmental writing — acclaimed author James Bradley plunges into the unknown to explore the deepest recesses of the natural world, guiding readers through the atomic creation of the oceans to the wonders contained within, like the schools of fish who use electromagnetic sensing to migrate across the globe; describing how human populations have circumnavigated the world by boat; and interrogating the environmental catastrophe already impacting our lives. Deep Water celebrates the ocean’s glories and the extraordinary efforts of the scientists and researchers currently unlocking its secrets.
Offering vital new ways of understanding humanity’s place on our planet, Bradley shows that the oceans might yet save us all.
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Paperback
- 198mm x 129mm
- 464 pages
- 9781914484599
- GBP£12.99
- 13 February 2025
- World English ex. ANZ and North America
Awards
- Shortlisted for the 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for Nonfiction
- Winner of the 2025 New South Wales Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction
- Shortlisted for the 2024 Queensland Literary Awards for The University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award
Praise
‘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.’
‘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.’
About the Author
James Bradley is a writer and critic. His 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. Alongside his books, James has an established career as an essayist and reviewer, whose work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The Monthly, Sydney Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Meanjin, and Griffith Review. His fiction has won or been shortlisted for a wide range of Australian and international literary awards, and his nonfiction has been shortlisted twice for the Bragg Prize for Science Writing and nominated for a Walkley Award. In 2012, he won the Pascall Award for Australia’s Critic of the Year. He is currently an Honorary Associate at the Sydney Environment Centre at the University of Sydney.