The Drowned Places
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  • Published: 23 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781784744007
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

The Drowned Places

Diving in Search of Atlantis

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
23 Apr 2025
EBook
17 Apr 2025
Audiobook
17 Apr 2025
Hardback
17 May 2025
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From Ancient Greece to Port Royal, Damian Le Bas embarks on a cultural exploration of diving, investigating sunken human ruins around the world and the marine life that thrives there now

'Literary and learned. It goes deep' AMY LIPTROT
'The most compelling and evocative of underwater odysseys' KATE HUMBLE
'The most captivating book on diving that I have ever read' MENSUN BOUND

Damian Le Bas explores the meaning we find in sunken ruins around the world in this spellbinding love letter to diving.

Thousands of years ago, an island off the Straits of Gibraltar went to war with ancient Athens. The battle was lost, and an earthquake cleaved the land in two. Overnight the island sank beneath the waves – or so legend tells.

As a young boy, Damian Le Bas was captivated by the story of the lost city of Atlantis. As an adult, he dreams of diving to discover its ruins. After the death of his father, torn between his lifelong desire and the taboo his Romany culture places on the ocean, he comes by chance across a dive shop. He can’t help but go in.

Under the waves, Damian enters a breathtaking world. As he masters the skills of this exhilarating sport, diving with seals in the Farne Islands, exploring submerged Roman ruins in Naples and mapping the sunken city of Port Royal in Jamaica, he is entranced anew, by wonders both man-made and natural.

Plato's writings on Atlantis were a parable about the hubris of humankind; in witnessing our effects on oceans and ocean communities, Damian finds echoes of this in the modern world.
  • Published: 23 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781784744007
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

About the author

Damian Le Bas

Damian Le Bas was born in 1985 into a long line of Gypsies and Travellers. He was raised within a network of relations who taught him how to ride and drive ponies, tractors and trucks, sing melancholy cowboy ballads and speak the thousand-year-old Romani tongue. He was awarded scholarships to study at Christ’s Hospital and the University of Oxford. Between 2011 and 2015 he was the editor of Travellers’ Times, Britain’s only national magazine for Gypsies and Travellers. The Stopping Places is his first book.

Damian lives and works mostly in Kent, with his wife (the actor Candis Nergaard); and Sussex, where he grew up and where his nan – who taught him the old Romany Travellers’ little-known routes and ways – both still live.

portrait photo of Damian Le Bas

Also by Damian Le Bas

The Stopping Places
See all

Praise for The Drowned Places

An enthralling exploration of the liminal by one of the most exciting writers around. A breathtakingly good book

TRISTAN GOOLEY, author of How to Read a Tree

The most captivating book on diving that I have ever read. But it is not about diving as a sport; it is about diving as an accessway to submerged landscapes, the festival of life that inhabits them and, above all, the drowned ruins of lost civilisations

MENSUN BOUND, author of The Ship Beneath the Ice

I loved this book - a wonderful interweaving of diving and exploration with coming to terms with grief, beautifully written and endlessly fascinating. One of the best books that I have read in a long time

DAVID GIBBINS, author of A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks

Le Bas goes on a compelling dual journey in this book, both historical and personal. His curiosity brings the ancient myths and stark realities of the ocean vividly to life. A various, rich exploration

SOPHIE ELMHIRST, author of Maurice and Maralyn

Loss, risk, adventure and redemption. Le Bas has written the most compelling and evocative of underwater odysseys

KATE HUMBLE, author of A Year of Living Simply

A powerful and superbly profound book where myth and history meet personal journey through the prism of diving

ROB COWEN, author of Common Ground

A very good book. THE book about diving I couldn’t find a few years ago: giving both the technicalities and the wonder

AMY LIPTROT

Beautifully written…The Drowned Places is one of the best books on diving that I have ever read

Literary Review

Le Bas is a fine, vivid writer and his diving adventures are immersively told. I’ve read few better descriptions of the contradictions of the sport, its wonder and its terror, its grace and its absurdity

Sunday Telegraph

Le Bas is a fine, vivid writer… I've read few better descriptions of the contradictions of the sport, its wonder and its terror, its grace and its absurdity

Alex Diggins, Sunday Telegraph

[Le Bas] writes well about grief, finding rich metaphors in each submarine landscape

Guy Stagg, Spectator

It's the best book I have ever read about the experience and subjectivity of diving - whilst reading it I kept thinking, "I've felt that before, but I've never said it in words"

SIR TONY ROBINSON

Beautiful and thought provoking

Tom Lathan, TLS