Below Deck

Description

We choose to breathe, don’t we? Twenty-one-year-old Olivia hears the world in colour, but her life is mottled grey. Estranged from her parents, and living with her grandfather who is drowning in sadness, Oli faces the reality of life beyond university alone. When she wakes on a boat with no recollection of how she got there, she accepts the help of two strangers who change the course of her future forever. With Mac and Maggie, Oli learns to navigate a life upon open ocean and the world flowers into colours she’s never seen before. Four years later, Oli, fluent in the language of the sea, is the only woman among men on a yacht delivery from Noumea to Auckland. In the darkness below deck, she learns that at sea, no one can hear you scream. Below Deck is about the moments that haunt us, the moments that fan out like ripples through the deep. So that everything else, becomes everything after. “A novel that speaks implicitly but never didactically to the trauma of the #MeToo age . . . an astonishing achievement.” SIR JONATHAN BATE, University of Oxford “Below Deck will leave you breathless. Sophie Hardcastle is a phenomenal, courageous talent.” CLEMENTINE FORD, author of Fight Like a Girl “The most tender, hopeful battle-cry of a book.” BROOKE DAVIS, author of Lost and Found