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Kerri's book pick this week is "Submergence," a new novel out on Minnesota's 

. Euan Kerr handed Kerri a copy of the book and said it was 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," said Kerr. "Author J.M. Ledgard says he hopes the book will haunt readers, and that odd instances in their lives will spur memories of the novel in years to come.  To this reader at least, that seems very likely."


New York Magazine's Kathryn Schulz said it's the best novel she's read so far this year. "Like water," she wrote, "text is a medium, but no other novel this year has left me so immersed. 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."


Schulz on J.M. Ledgard's Submergence: The Best Novel I've Read This Year


As a plot unmoored from its prose, this could be a film treatment for the next Bond movie, or jacket copy for John le Carre. But Ledgard is up to something very different here. The real subject of his book is scale: the vastness of time and space, and the impossibility of squaring either one with our own experience. (New York Magazine)


But now 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, as in this moment when new lovers part at the foot of a staircase: "Without warning he was battered with conflicting emotions and identities, as if a train had braked hard and all the baggage had come crashing down on top of him." "Submergence" is a hard-edged, ultracontemporary work about people a reader cares for, apart and together, through extraordinarily precarious conditions. (New York Times)

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Local publishing house scores a hit with story about romance, espionage, science and more.

Ledgard's 'Submergence' hailed as a mind-expanding read

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