Shadow Divers

byRobert Kurson

The True Adventure of Two Remarkable Men Who Solved An Incredible Second World War Mystery

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In 1991, sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey, at the incredible depth of 230 feet underwater, two amateur divers, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, find what divers dream about: an undisturbed wreck that they soon identify as a German U-boat.

Week by week – and then year by year – these two polar-opposite figures and their team of daredevil divers seek to identify the vessel that in the meantime they call “U-Who”; three divers, including a father and son, die while trying to do so. No historian or government can solve the puzzle and official records agree that there couldn’t be a U-boat there.

But after increasingly perilous diving…and painstaking archival research…and gaining the trust of retired U-boat crew…these two polar-opposite divers, who move from being rivals to comrades, finally identify it as U-869 and work out what on earth it’s doing there.

Then they trace the families of the men who died on U-869, whose bones they’d agreed they wouldn’t touch, in an ending worthy of Steven Spielberg.

It’s a story of – among other things – persistence, ingenuity and a shared obsession…

The narrative is so well paced and constructed that it develops a hypnotic, almost suffocating tension … But it is far more than mere adventure; this is also a haunting, painful story of obsession and its attendant costs. For once, the comparisons with The Perfect Storm are not out of place; this is a memorable story, beautifully told.

Neil Hanson, Sunday Times

About Robert Kurson

Robert Kurson is the bestselling author of Shadow Divers, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for 24 weeks and translated into 22 languages. He began his career as an attorney, having graduated from Harvard Law School, and his stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Esquire, where he won a National Magazine Award in 2006 and was a contributing editor. Robert has also written three further New York Times bestsellers.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9781405990578
  • Length: 416 pages
  • Price: £7.99
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