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  • Published: 3 April 2024
  • ISBN: 9781761346446
  • Imprint: Penguin Random House Australia Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $36.99

Deep Water

The world in the ocean




Through history, science, nature writing, and environmentalism, Deep Water invites you to explore the deepest recesses of our natural world.

'Teeming with mysteries, wonders and heartbreaking facts, this beautiful, lucid hymn to the sea is a reminder of what we still have, what we stand to lose, and why we must never stop fighting to save our home.'
Tim Winton

The ocean has shaped and sustained life on Earth for billions of years. Its waters contain our past, from the deep history of evolutionary time to exploration and colonialism; our present, as a place of solace and pleasure, and as the highway that underpins the global economy; and – as waters heat and sea levels rise ever higher – our future.

Deep Water is both a hymn to the beauty, mystery and wonder of the ocean, and a reckoning with our complex relationship to the natural world. It is a book shaped by tidal movements and deep currents, and lit by the presence of other minds and other ways of being. Weaving together science, history and personal reflection it explores the way the ocean connects every living being on Earth, the origins of the environmental catastrophe that is overtaking us and the question of what lies ahead.

Immense in scope but also human and intimate, Deep Water offers new ways of understanding not just our relationship with the planet, but the past – and perhaps most importantly, the future.

  • Published: 3 April 2024
  • ISBN: 9781761346446
  • Imprint: Penguin Random House Australia Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $36.99

About the author

James Bradley

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. His essays and articles have appeared in The Monthly, The Guardian, Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, Meanjin, the Weekend Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. In 2012 he won the Pascall Prize for Australia’s Critic of the Year, and he has been shortlisted twice for the Bragg Prize for Science Writing and nominated for a Walkley Award. He lives in Sydney.

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Praise for Deep Water

Teeming with mysteries, wonders and heartbreaking facts, this beautiful, lucid hymn to the sea is a reminder of what we still have, what we stand to lose, and why we must never stop fighting to save our home.

Tim Winton

What a wondrous book. In vivid, urgent prose, James Bradley takes us on a journey through oceanic worlds. Epic in scope and charged with a compulsive capitalist critique, Deep Water balances the grief of environmental catastrophe with a profound sense of awe and possibility. There is no false hope here. But there is hope.

Billy Griffiths, author of Deep Time Dreaming

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